Open source network management comparison: Introduction

One side effect of the increased competition in open source network management is that it is becoming increasingly hard to choose which tool is right for you.

With that in mind I intend to create a comparison featuring the best known open source tools to make the process of choosing the right tool a little bit easier.

I’ll publish the comparison in tranches so that, by the end of it, a comprehensive comparison is available. The first tranches will present more general information. As the series progresses more detailed information will be presented.

The projects being compared are, in no particular order: OpenNMS, Nagios, Zenoss, Hyperic and Zabbix. These projects have been chosen because they represent the best of the “pure” open source plays and the emerging “commercial” open source companies.

Both Zenoss & Hyperic have closed source offerings. As this is an open source comparison, I will only compare the respective open source offerings.

The comparison tables include notes denoted by numbers in superscript. The tables don’t include sufficient space to include much text so any further explanatory text has been placed at the bottom of the comparison table.