New Continuous Support System

An anonymous reader writes "eWeek is reporting on a new continuous open-source support system that helps to keep tabs on your mission-critical applications by providing constant diagnostic monitoring. The system is designed to match specific 'signatures' from your applications to a database of over 200,000 possible 'problem' signatures and alert the user for correction or analysis. From the article: 'SourceLabs' Continuous Support System features what Sebastian calls "adaptive diagnostic probes" that are fully integrated and configured for customer environments. The probes identify production issues and begin to gather diagnostic information to help get to the root of the problem, he said. Indeed, the probes can be configured so that as soon as a problem occurs, the SourceLabs support team extracts system information to find and resolve the problem. And the system includes a database of more than 200,000 signatures of problems that might occur.'"

Comments

Software is free, support is not

[DuckWizard]

I am really fascinated by this trend of selling support for open-source software. If a company creates a free, open-source product, and then uses support as their business model (RedHat, for example), doesn't that produce a conflict of interest in regards to the quality of their product? If the product is difficult to use, they will make more money off support. If it's rock-solid and completely intuitive, their revenues will crumble. Am I making any sense?

Re:Software is free, support is not

[bcat24]

I think they rely on two things:
1) Software almost always sucks to some degree
2) People are excellent at finding new ways to break "rock-solid" software

You know, the whole "make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot" type thing.

Huh?

[pongo000]

What kind of signatures? What kind of diagnostics? What the hell, exactly, is this article about?

And no, I'm not going to RTFA...if the submitter isn't articulate enough to succinctly describe what it is he or she is submitting, I'm not going to waste my time following the link.

Instead, I'm going to waste my time writing inane comments such as this...

Yea, right.

[BigCheese]

I can't count how many times I've heard this before. You either get spammed silly by alerts or turn the alerts down and then do what you did before you bought the product.

Sometimes you can get some use out of them but you've got to spend a whole lot of time with it in setup and ongoing adjustments.

Too many managers buy these things expecting a "Magic Bullet" solution.