Logstash vs. PRTG Network Monitor

Logstash is a must in an ELK stack, which I am sure is going to be the #1 case. At any point when you have several sources, Logstash can be the common point to aggregate, and categorize those data. Then send this new data to its destination. Very handy. It is free and open source. It may not be appropriate to analyze data-sets dependent on each other but from a different data source. Reason being Logstash works on data at hand, and not wait for other data to arrive. It would be unwise for Logstashh to handle complicated, long-running transformations because this is injected and ejected. The faster you do it, the safer.

Incentivized

It is well suited for an environment that deploys networking equipment and is needing monitoring 24/7. It works well to deliver real time data and alerts that are suited for taking action and notifying groups of members. It is less appropriate for use cases that involve only a few devices that don’t have dedicated teams looking for problems or uptime.

Incentivized

• Plugin ecosystem allows modular extensions.
• Tight integration into the Elastic.com products of Beats and Elasticsearch, so minimal setup is required when using those tools.
• Filter plugins are powerful for extracting and enriching input data.

Incentivized

• Very, very configurable. You can create all kinds of monitors for all kinds of things. Plus it has loads of suggestions out of the box. It can get complicated but monitoring is complicated. Pretty decent interface and good support - active community.
• I really liked how easy it was to add alerts by SMS. So easy to setup.
• I like their sizing models (for purchase). We're actually small enough that we are free. But it's not free as in stripped down - it's free because we don't use many "sensors" and don't honestly have the need.

Incentivized

• Memory: Logstash is a HOG, if you are deploying it on commodity (i.e. cheap and old) hardware: You will need at least 2GB, just for Logstash. So don't expect to run your entire ELK stack on one AMD Athlon machine.
• Overlap: Logstash fills in an area of the ELK stack that makes the most sense: as a log file transformer / shipper. However, if you start breaking that stack, with the addition of other components- you start seeing where features of Logstash may be implemented or solved in the additional components much easier (or better, or to a higher degree of resolution)
• More Overlap: Since my team employs Syslog-ng extensively- Logstash can sometimes get in the way (and this may be a problem for DevOps stacks overall): You can configure Syslog to record certain information from a source, filter that data, and even export that data in a particular format. Logstash will pick that data up, and then parse it. However, if you don't keep your Syslog-ng configuration files, and your Logstash configuration files in sync, your results will not be what you expected, and this will translate into (sometimes) hours/days of work, hunting down a line item in a configuration file.

Incentivized

• Licensing on a per entity basis can be cumbersome for devices which have a ton of monitoring points like network switches\routers. Each sensor may count against a license, which could be a lot of you were monitoring every TX\RX of an SFP for example
• A better method to easily template\copy monitors across devices
• The navigation in the web GUI could be a little more straightforward in terms of the hierarchy

Incentivized

I would renew it because the platform has brought us many technical and economic benefits that make the cost-benefit ratio very good. Additionally, to do so does not require large investments in training, licensing or infrastructure, and at the administration level, extensive knowledge is not required to be able to bear it.

Incentivized

As I said earlier, for a production-grade OpenStack Telco cloud, Logstash brings high value in flexibility, compliance, and troubleshooting efficiency. However, this brings a higher infra & ops cost on resources, but that is not a problem in big datacenters because there is no resource crunch in terms of servers or CPU/RAM

The tool is very intuitive to use and it is Windows-based (everybody knows how to use Windows) so it's easy to get into. Every time is setup in a hierarchy so if you have a good initial hierarchy design, it will really reduce administrative effort down the road.

Incentivized

I am giving this a 6 simply because I have never had to contact support. The online documentation is adequate for most things, and the user-maintained knowledgebase is excellent. The few times I have run into issues that were not easily resolvable with intuitive UI, I was able to find the answers that I needed either in the PRTG-provided documentation, the knowledgebase, or with a quick online web search.

Incentivized

It's very important that de project's teams have different member of the TI. We have learned too late the importa of Security Analyst at the design architecture moment. We have to rebuild part of the implementation for made this big mistake.

Incentivized

MongoDB and Azure SQL Database are just that: Databases, and they allow you to pipe data into a database, which means that alot of the log filtering becomes a simple exercise of querying information from a DBMS. However, LogStash was chosen for it's ease of integration into our choice of using ELK Elasticsearch is an obvious inclusion: Using Logstash with it's native DevOps stack its really rational

Incentivized

When I evaluated Centreon back in 2014, it felt overly complex compared to PRTG Network Monitor. Centreon's configuration required deeper technical expertise, involving manual setup and extensive scripting. The interface seemed less intuitive and demanded more time to manage and maintain. In contrast, PRTG Network Monitor offered simpler sensor-based monitoring and a more user-friendly interface, which ultimately influenced my choice.

Incentivized

• It is very difficult to give any figures on ROI, as it depends on many factors, and in a Telcocloud environment, it is much complex to find out; however, I would give some points below on ROI
• ROI based on flexibility is very high, as it reduces the time to find RCA
• ROI based on integration is very high because it supports multi-vendor environments, avoiding vendor lock-in & works across multi-cloud setups
• ROI on resource consumption is less because Logstash in 2-3 times more resource-intensive as compared to its lightweight alternatives resulting in latency

• PRTG has definitely had a positive impact on the business as monitoring can all be done from a central location and is easily accessible by all the relevant stakeholders.
• It can easily give us stats on up time etc which is used for statistics and SLA monitoring etc - this provides customers with detailed information which we wouldn't' otherwise be able to provide.
• For the price, I think it is the best product available on the market

Incentivized