I’m in the middle of a rather protracted evaluation of network infrastructure monitoring software. I’ve started looking at Paessler’s PRTG, also SolarWinds Orion product and in January I’ll be looking at Ipswitch’s products.

I also started looking at Nagios and Cacti. That’s where the fun-house mirrors start. The first big hurdle is no cost vs. cost. The commercial products mentioned before are rather pricey while Nagios and Cacti are GPL, and open sourced, principally available for no cost.

With PRTG, it was an engaging evaluation however I ran into one of the first catch-22’s with network monitoring software, that Symantec Endpoint Protection considers network scanning to be provocative, and so the uneducated SEP client blocks the poller because it believes it to be a network scanner. I ran into a bit of a headache with PRTG as the web client didn’t register changes as I expected. One of the things that I have come to understand about the cost-model network products is that each one of them appears to have a custom approach to licensing. Each company approaches it differently. PRTG is based on individual sensor, Orion is based on buckets, and I can’t readily recall Ipswitches design, but I think it was based on nodes.

Many of these products seem to throw darts at the wall when it comes to their products, sometimes hit and sometimes miss. PRTG was okay, it created a bumper crop of useless alarms, Solarwinds Orion has an exceptionally annoying network discovery routine, and I haven’t uncorked Ipswitch’s product yet.

I don’t know if I want to pay for this sort of product. Also, it seems that this is one of those arrangements that if I bite on a particular product, I’ll be on a per-year budget cost treadmill for as long as I use the product unless I try the no-cost options.

This project may launch a new blog series, or not, depending on how things turn out. Looking online didn’t pan out very much. There is somewhat of a religious holy war surrounding these products. Some people champion the GPL products; other people push the solution they went with when they first decided on a product. It’s funny but now that I care about the network, I’m coming to the party rather late. At least, I don’t have to worry about the hot slag of “alpha revision software” and much of the provider space seems quite mature.

I really would like anyone who works in the IT industry to please comment with your thoughts and feelings about this category if you have any recommendations or experiences. I’m keenly aware of what I call “show-stopper” issues.