In the past, I’ve seen them both not want to give quotes for sponsored work, 
and say that they dislike user submissions because of, and this is my 
paraphrase, a combination of ‘we always have to clean it up to make it useable’ 
and ‘not invented here syndrome.’

 

From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Mike Hammett
Sent: Saturday, April 4, 2015 8:47 AM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] What Adam Armstrong of Observium thinks of WISPS

 

I had got the impression that he didn't even want user contributions.



-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

 

  _____  

From: "Jon Auer" <j...@tapodi.net>
To: "Animal Farm" <af@afmug.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 4, 2015 2:59:53 AM
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] What Adam Armstrong of Observium thinks of WISPS

It's more than just OIDs, adding device support involves a fair amount of 
fiddly little things. Finding/cropping icon, regex to match the OS/device type 
to handle it correctly, logic to handle the device-specific things, logic to 
work around whatever they broke in the MIB (remember when Cambium returned 
strings instead of ints for some counters?). Then more testing.

 

That's what makes Observium more useful out of the box than something like 
Cacti where you're adding OIDs onesey twosey to device templates.

 

I think a big part of his reaction is, if you watch IRC, for the past few 
months to years there have been people asking for WISP features and pretty much 
nobody in a place to write code to do it. My guess is he is time constrained 
and would rather work on other things (hence non-responsiveness to offers of 
money) combined with not wanting to deal with what could be perceived as 
self-entitled communication from some users.

 

The hostile reaction to WISP gear:

CMMMicro is a switch that doesn't even use the switch MIB -> Work done to 
support WISP devices doesn't pay off in helping support other 
Enterprise/Wireline devices.

 

Cambium is extra special because they version the PMP MIB against OS rev 
instead of starting out with a well-designed MIB as spec and fixing OS to 
match. The easy way out is to ignore that and use the latest but what happens 
when Cambium updates something? Bug reports from users on new OS complaining 
that something doesn't work. You update and now there's bug reports from the 
users that want to stay on old OS for a while. The hard way? Handle every OS 
rev differently/code gardening responsibility? You just can't win.

 

<I digress>

So, WISP gear, he doesn't need it and doesn't care. I need it and care so I 
write what I need. I may not  appreciate the politics of Observium but I'm 
being pragmatic. I contributed what little Cambium PMP device support there is 
in Observium currently and I have more devices I'd like to see supported. If 
the time comes that my contributions are turned away I'll look for another 
monitoring solution, not out of spite but because I need to monitor all the 
things.

 

There may come a time when I move to LibreNMS. They seem to have openness & 
saying yes down but I want to see how they handle saying no to extraneous 
things/feature creep beyond monitoring metrics (e.g. if it were me, allow/keep 
rancid integration but just say no to generalized IPAM). 

You can't please everyone and who/how they choose to please will be insightful. 

</I digress>

 

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Mike Hammett <af...@ics-il.net> wrote:

Do we know why Adam blows up whenever people specify OIDs they want to track? 
I've never bothered to figure it out myself. He made it seem like hte OID was 
such a small part of everything that needed to be done.



-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

 

  _____  

From: "Neil Lathwood" <neil.lathw...@gmail.com>
To: af@afmug.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2015 1:08:23 PM
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] What Adam Armstrong of Observium thinks of WISPS

On 31 March 2015 at 19:04, WaveDirect <li...@wavedirect.org> wrote:

Yeah you should accept at least equipment donations :)  Some of us may have 
spares we can part with and after you are done sell them to help buy other 
products you want to support.

 

The donation of equipment is a huge ++++. It wouldn't be necessary to send the 
kit anywhere just provide snmp access, that way we can see what data is 
available and work on adding support.

 

Thanks,

 

Neil

 

 

 

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