My grandpa loved cars. He worked on them with a level of passion most people reserve for things like expensive red wines and members of the opposite sex. He didn’t believe in outsourcing the care and maintenance of his wheels.
So I was shocked when one day he announced that changing his own oil was senseless. He was prideful, but he also valued his time and was adept at basic math: 4 quarts + 1 filter + 1 oil pan + 1 jack + 10 greasy fingernails + 2 trips to the auto parts store + 3 hours labor was not less than $29.99 + 45 minutes of watching television in the lobby at Oil & Tune.
This same general equation comes to mind when we hear tales of people instrumenting their own network monitoring solutions with open-source tools (see price comparison chart). When you factor in not just software costs, but hardware costs, and people costs to maintain everything, open source monitoring tools can quickly become more costly than a SaaS-based monitoring solution like LogicMonitor. (For more detail, download the network and server monitoring comparison whitepaper.)
You don’t have to take our word for it. This recent Twitter exchange between a Nagios fan* and a LogicMonitor client illustrates the difference in philosophies.
@NagiosFan: #Nagios is awesome 🙂 Except for the parts that are terrible and inexcusable. But mostly awesome.
@LogicMonitorUser: @NagiosFan I cannot disagree more. Too much work for not enough gain. But we each value things differently #nagios is not for me.
@NagiosFan: @LogicMonitorUser haha that’s ok 🙂 I like the extensibility and the initial ‘crafting’ for gains later. Plus, hella-automatable. What do you use?
@LogicMonitorUser: @NagiosFan I went down a #SaaS path with @logicmonitor services. Rocks in so many ways, and responsive as hell. Most of my RFEs done.
Of course, there are use cases where building your own monitoring tool makes sense. But for the greater percentage of SysAdmins, IT departments, and CTO’s out there, LogicMonitor has done the hard work for you, and serves it up on a silicon platter.
You may want to take a minute and do the math, like grandpa finally did. Then take your overalls off, put your toolbox away, grab a cup of coffee, and fire up a free trial…
*Twitter exchange was excerpted and the @names changed
– This article was contributed by Blake Beltram, Community Evangelist at LogicMonitor