You lucky people, yet more OSS

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.

By the looks of the Zenoss board they must have received a healthy dose of venture capital money. And the downloads are going thick and fast. The money tends to be a bit harder though, especially if you are relying on a support sale. That’s really hard.

The idea is far from new, hell we even tried it! Although, we did have a half arsed, underfunded attempt. They seem to have made a good stab at it. I wish them luck. The free open source NMS space does have some very nice projects like Nagios and OpenNMS as well as a raft of RRDTool wrappers like Cacti and Cricket.

It does surprise me a little bit that Zenoss got VC funding. I mean, an open source company can never really build a defendable market position. All of the crown jewels are freely given away so anyone can do exactly the same thing. Still, never stopped Red Hat did it? Maybe I’m a bit behind on current VC thinking on the subject.

Update October 2022: Indeed I was very far behind in my thinking. Please forgive my ignorance on this post. I plainly didn’t know about open core licencing when I wrote this. The reason Zenoss were successful is precisely because they did not give away all of their secret sauce in the open core product. If you wanted all of the secret sauce, you had to buy the closed product.