When I first arrived in PNG there was no way to monitor the devices on our network. We knew they went down when people called to complain. One of my first tasks was to build a NOC (network operations center), so I would know, get emailed, paged whenever anything went down.
I had done this at previous jobs several times, only now, I had to do it with zero budget.
There are opensource tools out there that are nice, but they have huge drawbacks in that the guy who sets up the NOC is the only guy who understands it. I needed something intuitive that anyone on the team or following me could learn quickly.
That rules out a LOT of solutions.
One solution that I knew and liked was Solarwinds 7. I wrote a friend years ago and they donated a license. Suddenly we could see all our devices and do monitoring. We fell in love with it and it was easy to manage. Now it's several revisions old, but still very useful.
Not long after that I wrote a letter to a company producing PRTG because I needed to bandwidth monitor my firewall via SNMP. They wrote me back with a 100 node license, gratis!!! FREE donated because we are a non-profit organization.
I saved that letter as 'this is my template for a successful donation request.'
Recently though we've needed to monitor services (linux and windows). So I began playing with Zenoss. But found that while it was the best opensource monitoring, it wasn't a simple and good compliment to Solarwinds. More like a replacement. It was hard to configure but not as hard as others.
Which brings me to IPsentry and WhatsupGold. IPsentry is an unassuming little tool, it looks a bit aged, but it's very powerful and easy to configure and does EXACTLY what I want to do. Total price $695.
I took out my request template, customized it, and sent it to IPsentry. Within 24 hours they donated a full package license to us!!!!!
I'm so elated right now I can't explain it to you.
THEN, I did the same for WhatsUpGold, which is around $4000 product now. (I remember when it was free). They wrote me back and said 'how many nodes do you need?'
WHAT!??? WOW!!!
Okay so that you are following:
-Solarwinds - $3000 - donated
-PRTG - $800 - donated
-IPsentry - $700 - donated
-WhatsUpGold - $4000 - donation possibly in progress
With those 4 products, there is no way anything happens on my network I don't know about.
Oh yeah,
Bomgar - appliance costs $61,000 - donated at cost $1400
Packeteer - new $10000 - purchased at bankrupcy sale $1300
I know I groused a bit about Microsoft changing their licensing on us and costing us thousands, so consider this post equal time and a thank you.
There have been some great donations to my department in the last several years.
Whenever I run into a problem I run through this mental flow chart:
And I get to that part about a creative solution, and I sent out emails and letters, and wouldn't you know it, God responds through people.
I have had failures, I've asked for donations and been told no. But it strikes me today, that in this one thing, I've had a tremendous amount of encouragement and success. God must REALLY want us to be able to monitor what is on our network. Look at that list of products? We would NEVER be able to have brought this NOC up to this professional level without those donations.
I am so encouraged by the fact that God seems to be blessing our efforts to supply professional support to the effort of Bible Translation. It's like a huge stamp of approval on my efforts here.
I would have never thought about writing for donations, years ago. I never had to, I always worked for corporations that had financial resources.
Here, we have to be a tad more creative and I thank God and give Him the glory for every creative effort and thought I've had in this area!!
So this is a thank you to the people who have contributed, to the companies and their donations, to the work of accomplishing changed lives through Bible translation!
