[c-nsp] off-topic NMS Suggestion

[Jason Gurtz]

> Commercially talking, I've seen Solarwinds have nice user-friendly
> product family named Orion, there are a few nice tools, it's built on a
> modular base, so you can buy only one, or integrate few of them.
> And is not really expensive, prices are reasonable.

As a Solarwinds customer let me say a few words...

It is a pretty decent product from an interface perspective and yes, not
too expensive in the grand scheme of things. It is fullfeatured and not
too fiddly

However, installation/maintenance of the software is a huge time sink. It
is so bad that our policy is to always hire a consultant to come on-site
and do the upgrade. The consultant is typically on the phone with
Solarwinds support for most of the day dealing with some database or
licensing issues. If it were a free or open source application this would
be expected. In the commercial world, a bit more polish is expected of a
$30K piece of software. Make sure you budget for this kind of time or
level of support if you go there.

The hardware requirements are also a bit of a concern as one scales up;
make sure you have enough RAM and disk I/O.

Caveat Emptor!

~JasonG