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4/5/2015
Gmail [Observium] observium managment should be more professional
Joshua Burgess <[email protected]>
[Observium] observium managment should be more professional
16 messages
John Brown <[email protected]>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: observium <[email protected]>
Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 5:56 PM
http://afmug.com/pipermail/af/2015March/018914.html
As a provider of internet connectivity (ergo a telco and a ISP) we use
licensed microwave and unlicensed microwave technologies to feed our
revenue generating customers. We also use
fiber, and copper based technologies.
microwave != wifi
We are not alone in using a mix of technologies to deliver bits to
customers. TMobile, ATT, Sprint, AllTel, Cellular One, Verizon, etc
all use microwave (wireless) technologies to deliver bits.
I, like others, have offered to write code, have asked for pointers on
how to get started writing code, all appears to have fallen upon deaf
ears.
I've offered to PAY others to write code to support our kit, with
features we need. No takers.
As a PAID user, I'm quite shocked and disappointed in Adam's childish behaviour.
Users of Observium should be concerned that their continued investment
could be a loosing path as more people move AWAY from the product and
go support other packages. On two lists that I saw the above URL, not
less than 3 dozen people said they where removing observium and not
renewing their annual subscriptions. I suspect that will become a
trend.
Cheers
_______________________________________________
observium mailing list
[email protected]
http://postman.memetic.org/cgibin/mailman/listinfo/observium
Joseph L. Brunner <[email protected]>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 7:27 PM
John,
When you consider how complex it is to "write software" its not something you can take up gradually. A Google
fellow ALL OF 32, estimates in his lifetime he has spent 50,000 hours writing software. I'm guessing that is 20
years, perhaps 60 hours a week (since he was a kid), as a "year" only has 8,760 hours.
And even Google the other day had massive gmail outage that CNBC reported during their telecast despite
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=5e708ea1f6&view=pt&search=inbox&th=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c86c303fc6c012&si…
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Gmail [Observium] observium managment should be more professional
1000's of pro's like him on staff tasked with their "software".
It's not some nothing you take up in your spare time and have much luck at it, imho.
If the cursory graphs and checks (which are pretty nice) in Observium are not enough, I recommend brining in
IBM netcool or HP Openview teams like many major ISP's (Level3, ATT) have had to do. Of course, these
consultants rate's start at $250/hour in my experience and not $100 a year like Observium :)
In our similar operation to your own, ran on behalf of private low latency trading firms between NY and
CHICAGO, with extremely secretive, precise requirements we monitor the "overall" network with Observium to
get "a sense" of utilization at 20,000 feet then drill down with very very precise tools written for each purpose in
python, java, bash shells, etc each with its own backend data storage and reporting scheme from a simple as
rrd files, log files, pcap files to as complex as Microsoft sql and couchbase.
In short, I think you are trying to do too much with one tool. You need a "polling style" app for the overview time
series, and you need "realtime sensors" that trip and alert in a second or less. We use many variants of both. I
call it "monitoring in depth". So even if 3 out of 4 of our tools fail the 4th one will alert us and the client, often
with seconds to "go flat". Imagine you were writing call options in microseconds and you didn't have the current
stock price or news about the stock :)
Thanks,
Joe
[Quoted text hidden]
John Brown <[email protected]>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 9:00 PM
Joe, as a person that has written millions of lines of code, starting
in the midseventies with BASIC, Fortran (both 4 and 77), Pascal, ASM
(6502, Z80, 68K, 8080, x86, SPARC, MIPS, etc), C and some C++, along
with scripting languages like PHP, Perl, and Python, I can say with
reasonable certainty that what is being asked is not more complex or
harder than what has already been produced.
Certainly being a jerk, using cus words and generally being highly
unprofessional has zip to do with actually writing code. It does have
everything to with being an ass.
What the leader of Observium has clearly said is that an entire market
segment and technology type is not worth his time and he has done so
in a most unprofessional manner. There have been MANY people, myself
included, that have been willing to compensate by way of money, spend
our time helping develop code, etc, all to be blown off and cus'ed at.
Maybe LibreNMS will be more successful since its a community project,
of people, by people and for the community.
Hundreds of people have asked for the ability to add the ability to
graph, alert, etc on a OID. Not an unreasonable request. A custom
sensor or similar could be created. The customer base has made
requests, the keeper of the keys has told them to pound sand.
[Quoted text hidden]
Adam Armstrong <[email protected]>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 5:10 AM
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=5e708ea1f6&view=pt&search=inbox&th=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c86c303fc6c012&si…
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All I see in that thread is even more of the same entitled behavior as the idiot who refused to take "no" for an
answer for half an hour and got banned from the channel.
This ridiculous drama is based purely on a small section of our user base believing they can demand that we
support the devices they use, because, well, they use them. WISPs are a tiny minority of our user base, and an
even tinier minority of our paying user base.
There's simply no justification for the huge amount of effort required to build support for these devices to
Observium's required standards.
Also, if you read that thread, it's hilariously clear that no one actually read it, because almost no one picks up on
the fact that the original poster claims I called all WISPs retarded, when in reality I was referring to the vendors
who write the MIBs (which is an undeniable fact to anyone who has ever tried to get information from wireless kit
via SNMP)! :DDD
In any event, all this demonstrates to me is that this is a sector of the market which is seemingly way too much
hassle to try to support.
adam.
p.s.
Best part of this email is that my mail client marked "cus" as a spelling mistake, since it isn't actually a word,
and belies the puritanical scaredofwords origins of the writer.
Not everyone lives in the "must not cuss!" USA!
[Quoted text hidden]
Nikolay Shopik <[email protected]>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 5:55 AM
Adam,
You are terrible at management, create observium WISP edition with 10K
per year if they still willing to buy that, you are good to go.
[Quoted text hidden]
Adam Armstrong <[email protected]>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 6:04 AM
On 20150405 10:55, Nikolay Shopik wrote:
Adam,
You are terrible at management, create observium WISP edition with 10K
per year if they still willing to buy that, you are good to go.
Y'see, the thing is, 10k from a dozen users probably wouldn't cover the effort required to build it!
£150 from a dozen users barely even covers reading through one vendor's MIB!
I think I've spent about 34 aggregate days worth of time on reading through MIBs and trying to come up with
workable database schemas to accommodate all of the devices.
Wireless kit seems to have been developed by people who had never encountered SNMP, MIBs or ASN.1
before. The MIBs are some of the worst I've seen anywhere, far worse than what you get from the "budget"
switch/router vendors. Every wifi vendor has their own idea of what goes with which set of entities and more than
one vendor thinks it's a good idea to write a new MIB for every single model they release.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=5e708ea1f6&view=pt&search=inbox&th=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c86c303fc6c012&si…
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Gmail [Observium] observium managment should be more professional
That's assuming they actually output more than a broken IFMIB, of course.
At the end of the day, these people have no idea of the scale of what they're /demanding/ nor seem to have any
understanding of the tiny percentage of the Observium userbase they represent. Observium is primarily a
platform written by an ISP/Telco engineer to monitor ISP/Telco kit. These people are acting like a skateboarder
who's turned up to a BMX track and is arguing all of the jumps need to be concreted so that he can use them.
For example, the devices that the guy I was arguing on IRC claimed to be super important to support? We have
something like 10 of them in our entire userbase. It's just insane, they have no sense of scale.
adam.
[Quoted text hidden]
Watson Kamanga <[email protected]>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 6:08 AM
Adam
Your comments make good Sunday morning reading .
Regards
Watson
Sent from my iPhone
[Quoted text hidden]
Mike Hammett <observiumlist@icsil.net>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 8:43 AM
Most of the wireless guys are ISPs, however.

Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.icsil.com
[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.icsil.com [2]
[3] [4] [5] [6]

FROM: "Adam Armstrong" <[email protected]>
TO: "Observium Network Observation System"
<[email protected]>
SENT: Sunday, April 5, 2015 5:04:58 AM
SUBJECT: Re: [Observium] observium managment should be more
[Quoted text hidden]
http://postman.memetic.org/cgibin/mailman/listinfo/observium [1]
_______________________________________________
observium mailing list
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http://postman.memetic.org/cgibin/mailman/listinfo/observium [1]
Links:

[1] http://postman.memetic.org/cgibin/mailman/listinfo/observium
[2] http://www.icsil.com
[3] https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL
[4] https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb
[5] https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligentcomputingsolutions
[6] https://twitter.com/ICSIL
_______________________________________________
observium mailing list
[email protected]
http://postman.memetic.org/cgibin/mailman/listinfo/observium
[Quoted text hidden]
Mike Hammett <observiumlist@icsil.net>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 9:10 AM
You also get no argument from me (and many other wireless ISPs) that the vendors are absolutely terrible at
SNMP. When I was working to get a Dragonwave link into Mikrotik's "The Dude" monitoring program, just
finding the correct MIBs and their dependencies was a bitch. Ubiquiti AirMax series didn't have a MIB until
version 5.6, which is still in beta. Their AirFiber series didn't even have SNMP for quite some time.
*sigh*
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=5e708ea1f6&view=pt&search=inbox&th=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c86c303fc6c012&si…
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We are pretty good at getting what we want out of our vendors, however. Can you put together a page on
Observium's web site that is mostly neutral in tone (blatantly calling them fucking idiots to their face might not
get us far) regarding generally how these vendors are fucking up and what they should be doing? Then we can
expend our energies to get them to fix things.
Keep in mind that there is a world of attributes that wireless operators would want to track that have no parallel
in the wired or even WiFi worlds.

Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.icsil.com
From: "Adam Armstrong" <[email protected]>
To: "Observium Network Observation System" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, April 5, 2015 5:04:58 AM
Subject: Re: [Observium] observium managment should be more professional
[Quoted text hidden]
_______________________________________________
observium mailing list
[email protected]
http://postman.memetic.org/cgibin/mailman/listinfo/observium
Adam Armstrong <[email protected]>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 9:25 AM
All they really need to do is be consistent, and coming up with a standard wouldn't hurt.
Why it's necessary for every vendor to invent their own special way of putting radios/lans/clients, etc into
SNMP, I don't know.
There's also the strange thing most vendors do where data is duplicated quite a lot. They'll duplicate half of the
radio data in the wlan table, for no good reason.
Most of the problems are historical and many of the vendors seem to be heading in the right direction, probably
down to a lot of whining from their customer base (which they seem to be especially good at, hah!).
At this point I think I've already wasted quite enough of my time on a clearly undesirable market segment.
The usability difference between Observium and Cacti is inseparable from the order of magnitude more effort
required to graph new things in Observium. That's just how it is. The reason we are different to other applications
is because we have lots of restrictions and unconventional ways of doing things.
adam.
On 20150405 14:10, Mike Hammett wrote:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=5e708ea1f6&view=pt&search=inbox&th=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c86c303fc6c012&si…
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Gmail [Observium] observium managment should be more professional
You also get no argument from me (and many other wireless ISPs) that
the vendors are absolutely terrible at SNMP. When I was working to get
a Dragonwave link into Mikrotik's "The Dude" monitoring program, just
finding the correct MIBs and their dependencies was a bitch. Ubiquiti
AirMax series didn't have a MIB until version 5.6, which is still in
beta. Their AirFiber series didn't even have SNMP for quite some time.
*sigh*
We are pretty good at getting what we want out of our vendors,
however. Can you put together a page on Observium's web site that is
mostly neutral in tone (blatantly calling them fucking idiots to their
face might not get us far) regarding generally how these vendors are
fucking up and what they should be doing? Then we can expend our
energies to get them to fix things.
Keep in mind that there is a world of attributes that wireless
operators would want to track that have no parallel in the wired or
even WiFi worlds.

Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.icsil.com
[1] [2] [3] [4]

[1] https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL
[2] https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligentcomputingsolutions
[4] https://twitter.com/ICSIL
_______________________________________________
observium mailing list
[email protected]
http://postman.memetic.org/cgibin/mailman/listinfo/observium
[Quoted text hidden]
Joseph L. Brunner <[email protected]>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 10:23 PM
These people are acting like a skateboarder who's turned up to a BMX track and is arguing all of the jumps need
to be concreted so that he can use them.
Best line ever...
I'm in total agreement with you Adam
Use Cisco/Juniper/Arista or you're doing it wrong!
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=5e708ea1f6&view=pt&search=inbox&th=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c86c303fc6c012&si…
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Original Message
From: observium [mailto:observium[email protected]] On Behalf Of Adam Armstrong
Sent: Sunday, April 05, 2015 06:05 AM
To: Observium Network Observation System
[Quoted text hidden]
Dan Yasny <[email protected]>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 10:35 PM
On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 10:23 PM, Joseph L. Brunner <[email protected]> wrote:
These people are acting like a skateboarder who's turned up to a BMX track and is arguing all of the jumps
need to be concreted so that he can use them.
Best line ever...
I'm in total agreement with you Adam
Use Cisco/Juniper/Arista or you're doing it wrong!
Original Message
From: observium [mailto:observium[email protected]] On Behalf Of Adam Armstrong
Sent: Sunday, April 05, 2015 06:05 AM
To: Observium Network Observation System
Subject: Re: [Observium] observium managment should be more professional
On 20150405 10:55, Nikolay Shopik wrote:
> Adam,
>
> You are terrible at management, create observium WISP edition with 10K
> per year if they still willing to buy that, you are good to go.
Y'see, the thing is, 10k from a dozen users probably wouldn't cover the effort required to build it!
£150 from a dozen users barely even covers reading through one vendor's MIB!
I think I've spent about 34 aggregate days worth of time on reading through MIBs and trying to come up with
workable database schemas to accommodate all of the devices.
Wireless kit seems to have been developed by people who had never encountered SNMP, MIBs or ASN.1
before. The MIBs are some of the worst I've seen anywhere, far worse than what you get from the "budget"
switch/router vendors. Every wifi vendor has their own idea of what goes with which set of entities and more
than one vendor thinks it's a good idea to write a new MIB for every single model they release.
That's assuming they actually output more than a broken IFMIB, of course.
At the end of the day, these people have no idea of the scale of what they're /demanding/ nor seem to have
any understanding of the tiny percentage of the Observium userbase they represent. Observium is primarily a
platform written by an ISP/Telco engineer to monitor ISP/Telco kit. These people are acting like a
skateboarder who's turned up to a BMX track and is arguing all of the jumps need to be concreted so that he
can use them.
For example, the devices that the guy I was arguing on IRC claimed to be super important to support? We
have something like 10 of them in our entire userbase. It's just insane, they have no sense of scale.
So why not, instead of just being an ahole about it, say it directly: what you ask for requires X hours times Y
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=5e708ea1f6&view=pt&search=inbox&th=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c86c303fc6c012&si…
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dollars. Every update you will want will be Z dollars on top of that. And let the people demanding the feature
make their own calculations on whether or not they want to go ahead and cash out? In my experience building
large complex systems, this approach keeps everyone happy, and quite often turns into a well paid for project.
adam.
_______________________________________________
observium mailing list
[email protected]
http://postman.memetic.org/cgibin/mailman/listinfo/observium
_______________________________________________
observium mailing list
[email protected]
http://postman.memetic.org/cgibin/mailman/listinfo/observium
_______________________________________________
observium mailing list
[email protected]
http://postman.memetic.org/cgibin/mailman/listinfo/observium
Mike Hammett <observiumlist@icsil.net>
ReplyTo: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
To: Observium Network Observation System <[email protected]>
Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 10:37 PM
None of those companies make gear for our space and the wireless stuff they do make gets laughed at.

Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.icsil.com
From: "Joseph L. Brunner" <[email protected]>
To: "Observium Network Observation System" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, April 5, 2015 9:23:12 PM
[Quoted text hidden]
_______________________________________________
observium mailing list
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https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=5e708ea1f6&view=pt&search=inbox&th=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c866f66cbd7846&siml=14c86c303fc6c012&s… 10/10