Network Management

Mark Hinkle from Zenoss sent me a link to an interesting document he prepared yesterday. I think Mark may be over egging Zenoss clear market leadership but without any doubt their growth over the last year has been impressive. Perhaps the most impressive thing to take away is that all of the projects featured have grown over the last year.

One of the great things about sourceforge, apart from the cool services they provide free to open source projects, is that they provide statistics about the projects they host. One of the stats that sourceforge provides is a history of project downloads. You can’t compare the stats though. So I thought it would be interesting to compare the downloads for the major open source network management projects. The volume of downloads is indicative, like search trends, of the relative mind share for each project.

The most puzzling aspect of the new wave network management buzz comparison is the OpenView & NetIQ graph. I find it hard to believe that either OpenView or NetIQ are losing traction in the marketplace. So, how do you explain the fall in their respective number of searches? Network management vs network monitor First port of call was to see how the industry in general is doing. Whilst far from perfect I think that the network monitor & network management keywords will provide a reasonable guide to search trends.

Google Trends is an on-line service for comparing the search volumes for up to five keywords. I thought it would be interesting to compare the relative buzz of the new wave open source network management players between themselves, but also between other open source projects and commercial products. Google Trends doesn’t supply the search volumes themselves, so no quantitative data will be presented. The data that is presented is solely comparative.

FYI there is an interesting interview with Chris Sanders, author of “Practical Packet Analysis: Using Wireshark to solve real-world network problems”. If you are new to packet analysis, you can do a lot worse than read the book.

There does seem to be a lot of heat in whether or not the new wave open source systems management players are going to take on the Big 4 (IBM, CA, BMC & HP). You can get more info here and here. If the new wave do end up undercutting the Big 4, won’t the Big 4 just buy the new wave companies? The new wave are venture funded…venture capitalist want to cash out at some point.

Michael Tiemann made an interesting post titled Will the Real Open Source CRM Please Stand Up. Alex Fletcher wrote an interesting follow up. That got me thinking…how kosher are the licences used by the “new wave” open source network management companies? Have Hyperic, Groundwork and Zenoss really got the open source bug, or do they want the open source kudos without really opening up? I did a bit of digging around, and I am pleased to say that, at least to my non-legal eye, the licences do look the real deal.

I was interested to read Open Source: What Makes for Success? by Gordon Haff. Alex Fletcher has written an interesting follow up. Gordon Haff points out that one property of a successful open source company is to pick a very difficult problem that doesn’t touch upon too many parts of an organisation. A so called low surface area. Now, my question is this: are enterprise grade network and systems management applications low surface area or high surface area?

One of the odd things about the three new wave players is that, of the three, only one Hyperic supports Windows natively. The lack of native Windows support in the other two Zenoss/Groundwork seems like quite an oversight. It will be interesting to see whether the lack of native Windows support hinders their adoption. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t. Zenoss have produced a nice virtual machine for VMWare. Kudos to them for that.

A bunch of venture funded network management start-ups are storming the enterprise space with pockets full of venture capital money. The new wave comprise: Hyperic, Zenoss and Groundwork. What ties them all together? All of the tools are open source, but that isn’t new in network management. Projects like Nagios, OpenNMS as well as a raft of others have been around for a decade or so. What’s new is the combination of open source products and the level of funding going into the new players.