I've seen this exact same thing too. The "extenuating" (if you could call it that) factor was that the monitoring software was written in house and it was just shit. It might have been a pet project initially, but it didn't end up that way. It was just continued out of some combination of habit, risk aversion and not invented here syndrome.
When dumped and replaced by one of the better OSS versions in a few days by a developer who got fed up, things "magically" got much better, very quickly.
No praise or career boost at all for the developer in question, though. I think a large number of people (from management down) were embarrassed by the whole affair and wanted to forget about it. It seems that praise can only be dished out if you didn't embarrass somebody important.
When dumped and replaced by one of the better OSS versions in a few days by a developer who got fed up, things "magically" got much better, very quickly.
No praise or career boost at all for the developer in question, though. I think a large number of people (from management down) were embarrassed by the whole affair and wanted to forget about it. It seems that praise can only be dished out if you didn't embarrass somebody important.