Paessler pulls subscription licensing switcheroo on PRTG Network Monitor Fears that VMware's switch to subscription-based licensing would lead other vendors to follow suit may be coming true after Paessler confirmed to The Reg it has introduced new subscription pricing for its network monitoring tool, PRTG. Paessler, based in Nuremberg, Germany, has been offering network monitoring tools for …
"it plans to migrate 24,000 virtual machines from VMware to Nutanix."
Nutanix has it's own issues. Go that route and plan on buying 25% more resources (CPU, RAM) just to run the Nutanix agent on each host.
Proxmox is decent, but on a small scale. I'd be worried about deploying that in our Enterprise globally. I'm leaning towards XCP-ng / Orchestra, but there's little in support savings to be found there overall.
Maybe in 2018 if you were speccing criminally small hosts. These days the CVM is barely a blip on the radar - Plus you can get rid of your SAN and NAS in a lot of cases, so use that money instead to over-buy your hosts. It's not perfect for everyone but you'd be hard pushed to say it's not a good fit for a lot of companies right now, at least until you have some chats around commercials.
Member of a small-ish forum here. One of the members uses VMWare at his company, and from what he says it sounds that their yearly costs also went up way beyond what they expected.
Proxmox and other alternatives will make a killing. Especially if Veeam can get their flagship products to work on Proxmox as well.
Short term gain is foolish, as this destroys long-term prospects due to pissed-off customers leaving for cheaper solutions.
"Short term gain is foolish"
Short term gain means bonuses for senior manglement and a great addition to their CV. The CV will then enable them to move on to another victiim employer to pull the same trick there. Their replacements will have to deal with the consequences and probably discover it's too late to reverse it by switching back to the original terms.
Accountants are to blame. The reason quality overall has suffered is due to an accountant with an Excel spreadsheet with pennies out to four decimals trying to shave .0003 pence per unit off their costs. It's why hamburgers today taste like cardboard, cereal boxes are mostly air, cars have all sorts of extra fees on purchase and air travel has so little leg room it counts as a crime against humanity in the Hague.
We're already researching what will will do for our next VM infrastructure due to the VMware fiasco. I suppose we can now add PRTG to the list.
These people are already making a shit ton of money but now they want more without offering any extra services to the client.
I understand that companies need to make money but this is just pure greed. It's disheartening.
We have just started on a project to look at monitoring and PRTG was already being looked at to be replaced (we need more functionality than it offers) so there is even more of an incentive… although the cost is very small compared to some of the other monitoring systems currently in use.
I only looked at the free and demo versions (to support clients who wanted to use them), but it's not just the price that's heavy in that market. PRTG is at the lightweight simple-easy end of the system-automation landscape, and also less broken than some of its competition. I'm talking systems that need a 96GB xeon, or that only support a unique 'mixture' of snmp v1,2,&3, or that assume you will only want to monitor routers, or only monitor same-brand PLCs
Some of that market is so badly served that whatever license fees you pay are trivial compared to the hardware and support costs you incur. Paessler will lose market at the bottom, but by golly there's room for competition at the top.
I needed a method to grab info from switches, routers and PDUs.
After reviewing what was out there, it was either too expensive or they thought I was daft enough to use a cloud based system that would access my network core so, I decided to take a stab at doing it myself.
After checking with chatgpt, I told it I wanted code to pole a list of devices and display the info.
It spits out the code, I put it in visual studio and it sort of works. After a couple of hours of debugging it worked! May not scale well, but it does what I need for a couple hundred devices.
I asked chatgpt for additional code to email me when it is down. Now I have monitoring that I don’t have to worry about what a vendor is going to make me do.
If 2 hours of work can permanently replace what I would be using PRTG software for, they might want to think about what cards they are holding before they up the bet.
My point is how simple it was to create an INHOUSE solution that did not rely on the whims of another company. What it provides is only slightly better than a batch file.
VMware is a good example of how someone else decides how your business is to be run and they all seem to be going that way. Fight back.
Give it a few more years an open source AI will be able to run inhouse and do the job.
"I use zabbix, but it’s not for the faint of heart, nor the faint of brain. I've found their documentation to be descriptive rather than explanatory or instructional, but I may actually be faint of brain...”
I have upvoted this post, because, although I use Zabbix extensively, you do have a point. I would never suggest that anyone simply jumps in head-first and announces that this will be the monitoring solution of choice - but rather test it. It’s all free, download it, spin it up on a VM on any sort of hardware you happen to have laying around and try it out. Try monitoring one or two hosts and see what you get. Then think about expanding it out.
The 'getting started’ section of their wiki, is, I think, sufficiently clear to, well, get you started! After that, have a play!
And, I’m sure that they do offer a professional support service (paid-for obviously) but still, I suspect a lot cheaper than alternatives and without any lock-in.
Very sad to hear this, I've put PRTG into three companies as it's very easy for even junior support staff to get the hang of, everybody can get the info they need from it quite quickly. It's not been cheap - support every year but that's acceptable.
I think we'll be expanding Zabbix that we only use for Linux monitoring currently, to cover everything.
Given one of the benefits of PRTG was the VMware monitoring via vCentre, I suspect we wonlt miss it much now we've not using VMware.
"I think we'll be expanding Zabbix that we only use for Linux monitoring currently, to cover everything."
If you are already using Zabbix for Linux monitoring, then I would have thought it would be a no-brainer to extend this to cover other platforms as well.
As a fellow commutard mentioned above, yes Zabbix can be a bit of a head scratcher it you are literally trying to set it up from scratch, but you aren’t in that position. You already have the system working and are, presumably, aware of any foibles, and have a basic system working. For you it should just be a case of adding agents to your other hosts and adding them to the data collection - oh and redesigning dashboards etc. to accommodate these!
As an aside, a question to the other Zabbix users on here; do you stick with the Zabbix dashboards or drop the whole lot into Grafana and use that for displaying status?
It would appear that our "subscription" is more than doubling in cost (it would be quadrupling they were not offering any discounts) and we would also be tied in to a 3 year contract.
I have been reading up on various forums and there are a lot of disgruntled customers looking to move away towards other technologies or simply continue to run the product without a support wrap.
Even on their own website the uplift was quoted at 6.7% not 200-400% as per some customer experiences.
Our previous budget for this product was €3,472.11 now they are asking for us to uplift this to €10,583.28, so a 305% uplift on current costs for the same product.
Turn/River Capital are looking to get a return on investment but copying Broadcom and upsetting the customer base is definitely not lasting long term strategy. Short term gain for longer term pain as people move away…
If they are unable to make this a more attractive offer, and we are pretty much forced to renew under protest / need to opt to run unsupported, then we will be looking to move to another product asap and that will be the end of our journey for PRTG.
PE firms can go shaft themselves.
I've used PRTG for close to 20 years now, and while it was never cheap, it was justifiable. We've just seen the invoice for the new renewal, and it's around the 400% increase. Suffice to say that we are quickly looking at migrating to Zabbix, which we've played with before.
Same as we did with VMware. Did need to sign the 3 year contract as we didn't have the time to implement a replacement solution, but we're about to start going live with KVM and properly test that. There will be no new VMware instances created, and their only presense in our environments will be stagnant as they are removed.
Overall we'll be saving money on software, even if we need to employ another person, but that still ends up being significantly cheaper year 1, let alone across 3 years.
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