Network management is the art and science of managing an enterprise network.
There’s a buzz going around at the moment in the open source systems management space. A new consortium, aimed at evangelising the best tools and companies, has been formed. The Open Management Consortium is a loose grouping of projects, organisations and individuals interested in how open source can impact systems management.
The consortium has a great page with all of the member projects and companies. I think you’ll find much there to interest you.
Another commercial open source systems management software product has recently appeared on our radar. Hyperic, founded in 2004, is going after the enterprise market.
The following quote is from the Hyperic blog:
Enterprise customers are open to participating in communities and are eager to reap the >benefits. but they don’t care about having access to the source code of a product or >participating as much as some would like to think.
One of the interesting things to emerge in network management over the last year or two has been the commercial open source vendors like Groundwork & Zenoss.
The commercialisation of open source isn’t new, nor is it particularly surprising that commercialisation has happened in the network management space. Open source has been big in network and systems management from the beginning.
What has surprised me has been the focus of the commercial open source operators.
Why is agent less network monitoring called agent less? An agent is required! Pretty confusing really. I don’t suppose non-proprietary agent has quite the same ring to it.
What agent less really means is proprietary agent less. Not quite the same thing 😄
So, if you are using SNMP or WMI or whatever then you are performing agent less monitoring.
The main benefit to not using proprietary agents are that lots of different tools can talk SNMP/WMI etc but the chances are that only the proprietary vendor supports their own agent.
It is nice to see the open source network management community is still in rude health. Another network and systems monitoring tool has popped onto my horizon. Don’t know how I missed this one, it looks a goodie!
Based upon the much underrated application server platform Zope, Zenoss sure does look the part. If the website is anything to go by I can see a lot of IT and network managers finding a home for this one.
