I have consulted on operational monitoring for many years, including with a customer that claims to have the largest deployment of Nagios anywhere (50K+ nodes). The author hits on many good points, right up until they suggest a solution. My advice to customers has long been that you can make any tool successful, but the tools are not what really matter. Too often I've seen customers invest $MM in tooling, and fail to understand that people and process around that tooling is the real challenge. Too often both the entrenched enterprise vendors AND startups in this space miss this too. When it comes to tooling, the problem that too many startups miss is that they repeat the patterns that the entrenched players formed decades ago, and fail to understand that the kind of monitoring tools like Nagios and its clones offer is but one piece of a comprehensive solution for all but the smallest of operations.