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poxin
Nov 16, 2003

Why yes... I am full of stars!
Looking for recommendations on what solutions you folks like. Currently we are using and are familiar with Kayako for the help desk and PRTG for server/network monitoring.

The problem is both of these licenses are not getting renewed and the versions we are using are pretty drat old. Trying to find some free based solutions would be nice (and right now a requirement). Looking forward to some suggestions instead of spending a month playing around with different systems.

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adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer
We use OTRS for helpdesk, cacti for graphing, nagios for interface monitoring, and logstash for log collection and analysis.

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

adorai posted:

We use OTRS for helpdesk, cacti for graphing, nagios for interface monitoring, and logstash for log collection and analysis.

what's your nagios/cacti setup like?

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

Captain Foo posted:

what's your nagios/cacti setup like?
we monitor bandwidth on wan interfaces and interesting switch ports with cacti, and nagios just does up/down and ping monitoring.

Bald Stalin
Jul 11, 2004

Our posts
For help desk, I inherited and supported an on-prem 'ITIL-ready' service desk tool called ServiceDesk Plus by ManageEngine (an Indian software developer). They offer a free cloud solution, and you can pay money to add 'modules' for CMDB, Problem Management etc and technical support. It's not open source but I didn't hate it: https://ondemand.manageengine.com/service-desk/

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

adorai posted:

we monitor bandwidth on wan interfaces and interesting switch ports with cacti, and nagios just does up/down and ping monitoring.

I will check this out, I have a nagios /checkmk setup I'm not thrilled with right now

NullPtr4Lunch
Jun 22, 2012
I use RT (https://www.bestpractical.com/rt/), which is great.

and really bad hand-configured Nagios... :smithicide:

G-Prime
Apr 30, 2003

Baby, when it's love,
if it's not rough it isn't fun.
We're using BMC Remedy for ticketing. It's kinda a monster, but once you beat on it enough and do your own customizations it's not completely awful. I've been the sole admin on it for about 4 years now, here.

For monitoring, it's a few different things. The bulk of our polling is Solarwinds. We use it for actual statistics, and up/down monitoring on a pretty large number of network elements and their interfaces. A little bit of application monitoring in there as well. We've also got OpenNMS for up/down and trapping on a subset of our gear that's a unique snowflake with a MIB that wouldn't easily work with our main trap server, Netcool.

Netcool has direct Remedy integration, so we use that to create tickets from traps. OpenNMS and Solarwinds are configured to send emails, which then auto-generate Remedy tickets as well.

Walked
Apr 14, 2003

Ranter posted:

For help desk, I inherited and supported an on-prem 'ITIL-ready' service desk tool called ServiceDesk Plus by ManageEngine (an Indian software developer). They offer a free cloud solution, and you can pay money to add 'modules' for CMDB, Problem Management etc and technical support. It's not open source but I didn't hate it: https://ondemand.manageengine.com/service-desk/

I'm evaluating this and also looking into other solutions.

Really searching for something with change management and a perpetual on site license. Annual procurements sometimes lag so subscription based stuff often lapses where I'm at (government, outside my control).

Anyone have any other suggestions? SysAid is also on the list to check out. Smaller shop, so Remedy is overkill.

poxin
Nov 16, 2003

Why yes... I am full of stars!
For help desk I believe we may go with articdesk for the one time license fee. Been playing with the demo and it's quite nice for how comparatively cheap it is.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

For an MSP, you can always look at a PSA setup like Connectwise/Autotask, that tends to roll up service disk, CRM, billing, project management, etc. into one application.

Irritated Goat
Mar 12, 2005

This post is pathetic.

Maneki Neko posted:

For an MSP, you can always look at a PSA setup like Connectwise/Autotask, that tends to roll up service disk, CRM, billing, project management, etc. into one application.

We're moving to ConnectWise\LabTech for that.


I will say though, stay away from N-Able for monitoring. Sweet jesus :catstare: Some of the most common easy bullshit makes no sense.

Autotask seems fine for what we're using it for but there are some weird things like how the timer works for tickets.

wwb
Aug 17, 2004

Redmine and new relic here. Net cost about $0.

Wicaeed
Feb 8, 2005
Company is looking to replace a monitoring setup of the following

Office:
2 Centreon installs (Nagios backend) set up to monitor critical IT infra & Test/Dev/QA environments, as well as customer prem appliances
1 Cacti instance being used to graph interface statistics and network bandwidth. It's horribly set up.

Datacenter:
1 Centreon install (Nagios backend) to monitor all datacenter Infra. It falls over daily, and is suffering pretty badly from the fact that most of the configs are hand maintained, so we have out of date stuff everywhere

Our Devs are currently also looking to replace our entire Splunk environment (30-40TB of logs) with some kind of custom graphing/syslog monstrosity they are piecing together from scratch. I really doubt it will go off well, but poo poo, if they can pull it off, props to them.

I've been asked to evaluate some solutions to replace the Centreon/Cacti side of things that will act as our alerting & IT monitoring infrastructure.

So far I've tried the Shinken (Custom Nagios Fork) as a replacement. It's (relatively) simple to get set up and running, but seems to suffer from the same drawbacks as Centreon, in that it's still a Nagios backend (albiet way more extendable), but it offers almost nothing in the way of graphing (you have to run a separate Graphite install to get graphing, and I've never used it), also doesn't support agents in any way (except NRPE). IMO Nagios is a pain to configure for a non-DevOps person, and our department is really not heavy on the Dev. Manually hand writing Nagios config files makes me want to shoot myself in the face. Our Dev guys say "script something that manages the config files" like it's no big loving deal.

We'd like something that preferably can run an agent to collect local stats (and temporarily store them in case of network failure) and report back to some sort of clustered instance (a single instance for monitoring is a huge +++) and has to support security controls (TACADS/LDAP/etc).

I'm looking at Zabbix right now (I used it at my previous job, but wasn't the architect) and quite like it. Does most of what we want, and is extendable.

I'm also considering just shoving all of our network devices into LibreNMS for graphing/alerting to replace Cacti.

FOSS is a + for us, but what out there besides Zabbix supports all of our requirements?

Judge Schnoopy
Nov 2, 2005

dont even TRY it, pal

Irritated Goat posted:

We're moving to ConnectWise\LabTech for that.


I will say though, stay away from N-Able for monitoring. Sweet jesus :catstare: Some of the most common easy bullshit makes no sense.

Autotask seems fine for what we're using it for but there are some weird things like how the timer works for tickets.

I worked in a ConnectWise \ Labtech environment for 2 years at an MSP. It was extremely intuitive and I would recommend it for any MSP. My only beef with Connectwise is lack of custom dashboards. We wanted to have a digital whiteboard of sorts in the office that listed project statuses, priority tickets, long-ongoing issues, stuff that could quickly update the team on what the agenda should look like for the day. Connectwise doesn't offer anything like this.

My new environment has a software called ATTACC. The business that made it has disappeared from the planet so we're looking to migrate. We need something super lightweight and simple as this is in-house IT and is mostly used for 1) create / delete users, 2) printer issues, 3) new report requests from our software suites. No project management, no asset tracking, no crazy features offered by most helpdesk solutions out there.

ArcticDesk looks really lightweight and is probably my top choice for a trial. Is there anything else light, quick, and easy I should be looking at?

OWLS!
Sep 17, 2009

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN
We have a fairly monstrous Check_MK setup for our monitoring, and Jira for our ticketing. We used to use RT. (I miss it, Jira is nice, but it's kind of a hog).

Wrath of the Bitch King
May 11, 2005

Research confirms that black is a color like silver is a color, and that beyond black is clarity.
We use Solarwinds Orion for monitoring. It's fairly idiot proof even if the components/upgrade scheme can be somewhat cumbersome.

It also has a SOAP API as well as a Powershell module for working with automation.

Canine Blues Arooo
Jan 7, 2008

when you think about it...i'm the first girl you ever spent the night with

Grimey Drawer
I've also worked with Connectwise in an MSP environment and would recommend it. It's a good tool that manages to cram a lot of features into itself while still being intuitive (mostly).

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


I'm looking quite closely at Zabbix for monitoring so am going to keep an eye on this thread so somebody can tell me it's a huge mistake.

Mr. Clark2
Sep 17, 2003

Rocco sez: Oh man, what a bummer. Woof.

Sysaid for ticketing and Opsview for up/down monitoring. The version of Opsview we're using is EOL'd so gonna have to do something about that soonish. Sysaid...it works, thats about all I can say for it. The interface sucks rear end for doing anything other than working on a ticket, it's a confusing mess of ambiguously named menus.

Also looking at zabbix like that dude ^^

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

Judge Schnoopy posted:

I worked in a ConnectWise \ Labtech environment for 2 years at an MSP. It was extremely intuitive and I would recommend it for any MSP. My only beef with Connectwise is lack of custom dashboards. We wanted to have a digital whiteboard of sorts in the office that listed project statuses, priority tickets, long-ongoing issues, stuff that could quickly update the team on what the agenda should look like for the day. Connectwise doesn't offer anything like this.

My new environment has a software called ATTACC. The business that made it has disappeared from the planet so we're looking to migrate. We need something super lightweight and simple as this is in-house IT and is mostly used for 1) create / delete users, 2) printer issues, 3) new report requests from our software suites. No project management, no asset tracking, no crazy features offered by most helpdesk solutions out there.

ArcticDesk looks really lightweight and is probably my top choice for a trial. Is there anything else light, quick, and easy I should be looking at?

We run JitBit for lightweight helpdesk software

poxin
Nov 16, 2003

Why yes... I am full of stars!
We started using Zabbix, haven't had an issue with it and monitors about 1200 servers in a datacenter just fine. We were previously using PRTG (old version and expensive for what we need) but I did like that better.

Edit: For ticketing, still using ArcticDesk with no problems. The new version in development will be using Laravel too, pretty excited about that.

devmd01
Mar 7, 2006

Elektronik
Supersonik
Two places ago I was the BMC Track-IT! admin, it was fairly straightforward.

Currently using Spiceworks, which is obnoxious but for a super simple user emails in to create the ticket system it works.

These host file entries are essential though to cut out the ads and spiceworks community bullshit. If I find a possibly useful link using google, i'll just paste the link into another rdp session.

code:
127.0.0.1	gekko.spiceworks.com
127.0.0.1	community.spiceworks.com
127.0.0.1	xact.spiceworks.com
127.0.0.1	static.spiceworks.com
Solarwinds for network monitoring and at some point we need to get SCOM fired up since we're licensed for it.

Judge Schnoopy
Nov 2, 2005

dont even TRY it, pal

Captain Foo posted:

We run JitBit for lightweight helpdesk software

Can JitBit do custom fields for tickets? We have departments put in tickets when requesting new reports and they need to be able to fill in the fields they want. I like the look and functionality of JitBit but this is kind of a deal breaker.

poxin
Nov 16, 2003

Why yes... I am full of stars!
A revisit to this. ArcticDesk is working on V2 which looks very promising: http://www.arcticdesk.com/v2/ Coded in Laravel this time :)

Been using Zabbix for a bit now. Anyone using it I urge you to give these two a shot, a much better webui and graphing system. Alerta is bootstrap/javascript very easy to work with.

https://github.com/alerta/zabbix-alerta
https://github.com/alexanderzobnin/grafana-zabbix

Still in the progress of customizing the interface, but I have this so far. Much better!

ewiley
Jul 9, 2003

More trash for the trash fire
Opsview is good for a general-purpose setup for a few devices, Nagios, Cacti and SmokePing are good if you have large international WANs. Ticketing I've always used RT because everything else is HTML-laiden poo poo.

There are tons of 'managed' 'cloud' thingies if you hate setting up servers but they're all terrible, expensive, or will go away 6 months after you've set them up. I've seen people use spiceworks for everything, and it seems to work if you turn a blind eye to the fact that it now basically owns your infrastructure

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug
Has anyone here ever setup Nagios to read from a Resin server? I know you can do it, but Resin's documentation is kind of vague on how to do it.

MF_James
May 8, 2008
I CANNOT HANDLE BEING CALLED OUT ON MY DUMBASS OPINIONS ABOUT ANTI-VIRUS AND SECURITY. I REALLY LIKE TO THINK THAT I KNOW THINGS HERE

INSTEAD I AM GOING TO WHINE ABOUT IT IN OTHER THREADS SO MY OPINION CAN FEEL VALIDATED IN AN ECHO CHAMBER I LIKE

Irritated Goat posted:

We're moving to ConnectWise\LabTech for that.


I will say though, stay away from N-Able for monitoring. Sweet jesus :catstare: Some of the most common easy bullshit makes no sense.

Autotask seems fine for what we're using it for but there are some weird things like how the timer works for tickets.

N-Able isn't that bad... it's a somewhat immature product at the moment, but they aren't bad, just still growing etc. They've changed up their development strategy as well which will hopefully resolve some issues with fixes/enhancements not happening quickly enough. We are currently their largest client and monitor something like 20000+ client machines, it works fairly well, there are a few "gotchas" with how it works, but for the price it does work well. While not free, it is going to be on the less expensive end due to being relatively new in the market (when compared to some other monitoring solutions).

As far as ticketing solutions, we rolled our own and it's fantastic (our dev is awesome), but it's obviously tailored to our needs and our clients, plus my company does not want to become a software company, I've already talked to the owner a few times about the potential to market the ticketing system (and make big bucks doing so) if they made it slightly more modular/general, but alas not the direction they want to go in.

MF_James fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Dec 28, 2015

babies havin rabies
Feb 24, 2006

osTicket for help desk, Nagios for monitoring (mostly up/down but after several hours of work I got it to look at a remote raid array too :v: ).

LochNessMonster
Feb 3, 2005

I need about three fitty


Anyone working with the ELK-stack and/or graphite/grafana?

Beefstorm
Jul 20, 2010

"It's not the size of the tower. It's the motion of the airwaves."
Lipstick Apathy

adorai posted:

We use OTRS for helpdesk, cacti for graphing, nagios for interface monitoring, and logstash for log collection and analysis.

You are the only person I see who has mentioned OTRS. What do you think of it? I'm playing with a demo right now. It looks pretty slick for a free system.

ghostinmyshell
Sep 17, 2004



I am very particular about biscuits, I'll have you know.

Beefstorm posted:

You are the only person I see who has mentioned OTRS. What do you think of it? I'm playing with a demo right now. It looks pretty slick for a free system.

We're using OTRS as well. I think it's great for free, but you're gonna pay once you need someone to start customizing it or making major changes. And then you have to hope updates don't break any of those customization.

Change management really sucks though and not user friendly at all.

Solarwinds for monitoring, OpenVas + Alienvault OSSIM for more monitoring and vulnerability detection.

ghostinmyshell fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Mar 24, 2016

Walked
Apr 14, 2003

LochNessMonster posted:

Anyone working with the ELK-stack and/or graphite/grafana?

Experimenting with it; mixed results so far. I like a lot of what I'm seeing, though

LochNessMonster
Feb 3, 2005

I need about three fitty


Walked posted:

Experimenting with it; mixed results so far. I like a lot of what I'm seeing, though

Are you doing a trial and error way of testing it or are you following some kind of tutorial?

I'm building a virtual box and see id I can feed it log files to see what I can do with it.

Beefstorm
Jul 20, 2010

"It's not the size of the tower. It's the motion of the airwaves."
Lipstick Apathy
How about Jira Service Desk? Anyone ever use that?

Basically I'm looking for a better solution to our terrible OSTicket.

Walked
Apr 14, 2003

Beefstorm posted:

How about Jira Service Desk? Anyone ever use that?

Basically I'm looking for a better solution to our terrible OSTicket.

Yes; its our primary ticketing system. It's GREAT especially for the price.


LochNessMonster posted:

Are you doing a trial and error way of testing it or are you following some kind of tutorial?

I'm building a virtual box and see id I can feed it log files to see what I can do with it.

Sorry! Missed this. I have one of our junior admins testing it; he's out this week but I've been meaning to follow up with him and see where he's at and what resources he's using. I'll follow up when I can chat with him.

Super Slash
Feb 20, 2006

You rang ?
Throwing my hat on the Spiceworks pile, simple help desk with automatic inventory and scanners. If the integration bothers you they also offer a cloud version for help desk only.

703
May 11, 2007

Contains Carbon Monoxide
Bias as I used to work there

For MSPs or large infrastructures with a hodge-podge of vendor types- https://www.sciencelogic.com/product/solutions (not cheap)

Wrath of the Bitch King
May 11, 2005

Research confirms that black is a color like silver is a color, and that beyond black is clarity.
We use Solarwinds for monitoring and ITSM/HEAT for Help Desk and ticketing.

Solarwinds is easy to setup and very user friendly, but the web gui is pretty bloated and cumbersome. It provides tons of data that is easily exportable or presented in the form of a graph; management loves it. On the negative side, the product becomes much more clumsy to manage and upgrade as you introduce more components. SAM and NPM will get you where you need to be. If you want router/switch/firewall configuration backups NCM is really solid.

ITSM is a bag of flaming dogshit, but it's hard to tell if it's the product or the terrible engineer we have working on it that caused the problem.

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wwb
Aug 17, 2004

We are doing ticketing and knowlegebase stuff in redmine; monitoring is all over the place as our internal server guys are fighting monitor tooth and nail whereas the external server guy [me] is a bit more enlightened. Mainly doing new relic here, looking hard at ELK for a few things.

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