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Once you understand what
you expect to get out of enterprise monitoring, you'll have a better idea
whether this is something you want to outsource to the experts or just
handle internally.
We're guessing that the end goal for your monitoring
initiative isn't to give your Admins yet one more project to consume even
more of their time. Unfortunately, this is the most likely outcome if you
use free or nearly free monitoring software.
Managing a monitoring environment can
be a huge time drain so unless your Administrators happen to have a lot of
spare time on their hands, this is probably not something you want them
getting into. Managing monitoring tools can very quickly take on a life of
it's own!
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Is your mission to keep your network running reliably or to save a few bucks? |
Having the wrong monitoring tools can be worse than having no tools
at all.
The fact is that choosing the wrong software can result in
lots of false alarms in the middle of the night - or totally missed events
that never get reported.
Many monitoring products require a fair amount of
care and feeding. As an example, one product that we evaluated was so
unreliable that we had to have a different monitoring product monitor it
because it died for no apparent reason so often!
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FREE MONITORING: Worth every penny you paid for it! |
If building and managing a professional monitoring
environment was easy and inexpensive, we frankly wouldn't be in the business
that we're in.
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FREE MONITORING: pay now or pay later! |
Do the Math
The average Systems Administrator costs your IT Organization between $25 and $50
per hour (plus overhead)
Our top of the line, unattended high end monitoring service (which includes
professional grade monitoring software) costs $150 per
server per month
That's 3-6 hours of your Admin's time per Month, depending on what they
earn.
If your Admin can do it better, faster and cheaper than we can,
we'll probably want to hire him! (We're pretty sure he/she will be spending
a lot more than 1/2 a day per server per month on their little "free" monitoring
project)
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FREE MONITORING: The stakes are too high to take risks! |
What does one lost Customer cost you?
What is the cost of one hour's down time?
What is the cost to replace an Admin who's Spouse won't tolerate those 2 am
false alarm pages any more?
$600? Our annual fee for
Hardware Health
Monitoring? That's the cost of a Starbucks once a day or less than 7 cents an hour.
$1,800? Our annual fee for
Server Health
Monitoring? You can't afford $5 a day to know about problems before they
take down your servers?
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Vigilance Monitoring is a lot less expensive than using free software! |
When
your network is unreliable, who do they come looking for to complain (or to
fire)?
We'd bet that
person would think that piece of mind for $5 a day is a bargain!
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