From first commit to open source. The milestones that shaped Guardare.
Guardare is designed, product-managed, and led in code by Mike Cotrone, CCIE #8411 Emeritus (Routing/Switching & Voice), formerly of Cisco Advanced Services on the ISP team, with more than 28 years architecting, implementing, and supporting networks at enterprise and ISP scale.
Before VistaTech, Mike founded two companies and built successful MSP practices inside each. The first ran on Zabbix; the second on LogicMonitor. Years of operating both platforms in production — for paying customers, around the clock — taught him precisely where each shines and where each strains: the template sprawl, the per-device invoices, the weight every legacy NMS accumulates.
Guardare is the third act: the platform he always wished he could buy, built by a small development team and proven by VistaTech's own NOC — the team Mike manages and backs as final escalation. When the platform's architect is also the escalation point, every design decision is accountable in production.
Guardare begins as VistaTech's answer to expensive, heavyweight legacy NMS platforms: a lightweight collector built for real MSP work.
The first generation pairs collection with alerting: agentless API and Remote PowerShell collection feeding a rule-based alert engine, watching real infrastructure from day one.
Normalizer slots in between collection and alerting: multi-vendor data lands in dynamically created schemas, built and updated entirely from admin configuration, and the platform becomes an engine, not a script.
Second-generation rebuilds across vCollector and Events Director: SNMP and CLI collection added, hierarchical white-noise suppression, performance hardening, and PagerDuty and UptimeRobot in daily service.
Adding a vendor becomes a configuration edit, never a code change. Validated across four vendors in production.
Zero-duplicate documentation sync with full lifecycle management, running across production customer sites.
Bi-directional ticketing with Jitbit and TeamDynamix, assessment reporting, multi-language support, and the Guardare Admin Web UI in active development.
With the Admin Web UI complete, Guardare's source opens to the world.
