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John Willis on his excellent CloudDroplets #7 podcast mentioned a very interesting development in the enterprise open source network management space.

RiverMuse is an open source enterprise fault management system designed to replicate the functionality of IBM Tivoli & HP OpenView. RiverMuse has been developed by the original founding team of both Micromuse and RiverSoft.

The software isn’t available yet, it was due first week of November. I’ll let you know when it’s released.

Hyperic have just announced the release of Hyperic HQ version 4, the first cloud friendly network management system. Setting up a network monitoring probe in the cloud just got a whole lot easier.

If you need to create quick and easy diagrams but can’t justify a full priced tool like SmartDraw or Visio then you’re in luck. Dia is an open source diagramming tool that will make a welcome addition to your diagramming toolkit.

… a nice roundup by Linux.com outlining some of the options for network monitoring in a *nix environment.

John M Willis has done a great job introducing how enterprises can make use of cloud computing.

Enjoy! 😄

One of the great discoveries I made whilst writing this blog has been the ease with which I can create posts using Wordpress as the content management system (CMS). It started good and it just keeps on getting better.

I’d love to be able to update content on the rest of the site just as easily. Unfortunately, as things stand at the moment, updating the site means wading waste deep in PHP. All changes to the website need to go through either myself or Dean, slowing things down considerably.

I mentioned this in a comment over on John M Willis ESM Blog. I thought it deserved a post all to itself because I think it’s important.

One anxiety I have with hosting my websites is the bill I need to pay each month. There are many many hosting options out there, all with their own particular risk characteristics.

With the advent of on-demand cloud offerings like Amazon EC2 there are lot of new options. One of the characteristics of cloud offerings is easy scalability. Scalability does have a problem though, because your bill will scale too.

…I’m not sure whether I should be pleased or scared by today’s 1.5% cut in UK interest rates. After all, the Monetary Policy Committee don’t normally go around lopping 1.5% off interest rates. Things were pretty boring there on the economic front for a decade or so, it is surprising just how fast things can turn around.

According to a recent survey carried out by Fluke Networks, 29% of IT managers say they have been alerted to business critical problems by screams. Doesn’t sound like they have pro-active monitoring then? 😉

… things ain’t too pretty.

My favourite quote:

“Clearly, their VC people have no picture of the situation other than their own return of investment.”

Well, yeah duh! Why anybody would be surprised that VCs are money focused is a mystery. VCs are managing other people’s money so their focus is bound to be primarily money focused. Your retirement fund isn’t going to give two figs about open source, it just wants a decent return on investment given the risks it is taking.