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Open Source Network Management Beats IBM and HP
mjhuot writes "Last week SearchNetworking.com announced their Product Leadership Awards for 2007. It was a pleasant surprise to see an open source project, OpenNMS, win the Gold in their Network and IT Management Platforms category. OpenNMS beat out the established players of Hewlett-Packard's OpenView and IBM's Tivoli. This was based on a user survey of all IT solutions, not just open source; it demonstrates that open source software is indeed making inroads into the enterprise."
I have never used OpenNMS and don't know much about this product or any of the other commercial runner ups mentioned, but I noticed one thing from the OpenNMS homepage and that is that they have this OpenNMS Group which provides services, training and support for the product.
I think this is a model that more many other Open Source products would have a lot to gain from following.
One obvious benefit of this is that it allows the developers to get paid for working with the product, that way making it possible for some developers to spend more time with the product and they will be in very much direct contact with the users of the product, not only reading about the bugs in a Bugzilla. It allows for some the lead developers to really be devoted to the product which is a really big asset to any Open Source project where money can not be made from selling the program itself.
Another good thing about this is that it gives the companies who have to choose between products confidence that they can put some trust in that this project is not going to stop being developed because some key developer for some reason is leaving the project.
Of course some care have to be put into not making sure that model does not lead to one big costumer in the services, training and support department does not get to lead the development of the product, which could have negative side effects, but really I don't think the risk of this is too big, the worst that could happen from this is that the project gets forked, with one fork keeping on working for the "company version" of the product while the rest of the project goes in another direction, but if just the services, training and support groups follows the second group then whatever company can hire people to work on the company version of the product. It just means more good Open Source code and good jobs for OS developers, the GNU license should make sure that a company can not take the code and make it into a closed source project.
I can't get too http://www.opennms.org/. Their network management sucks!!!! :P
It was a pleasant surprise to see an open source project, OpenNMS, win the Gold in their Network and IT Management Platforms category.
Wow, thank you thank you. I can't believe I'm up here. To be even nominated in this category along with such greats as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli was honor enough. I need to thank so many people. First the programmers, without you none of this could have happened. My project managers brozow, dhustace, and tarus, you've been so great. How can I forget sourceforge for hosting out project? Wow, we've worked so hard on this for so long, to finally be recognized is so wonderful. I can't forget my parents, thanks mom and dad. And Richard Stallman, without you, none of this open-source stuff would have taken off thanks. It's been so hard, but I think you really like me, you really do like me.
There is a number of alernative Open Source monitoring software available. Nagios, Cacti and my favourite ZABBIX. ZABBIX is much less resource hungry comparing to Nagios and especially to OpenNMS.
I used to work for Tivoli and I know a little something about their system. It's CORBA-based, talks to a variety of databases (at the time I worked there, it supported DB2, Oracle, MSSQL, Sybase, and Informix) and supports many different types of Unix, plus NT and (last I looked) OS/2.
Tivoli's system does, well, everything. It can do software inventories (with a fairly intelligent scan) and distribute software packages to groups of hosts that have been flagged as lacking specific packages, for example.
As far as I can tell from everything I've read, OpenNMS only does monitoring and notification. And that's it. End of story. So how again does this even qualify to win this category? Does it actually do a lot more than people say it does? I'd love to see the official webpage, but it's down (MediaWiki rox121!1!1!!!)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sorry again my comments reflect I am not an native English speaker.
In my post costumer should be customer.
OpenNMS has world-class SNMP support, and configuring it literally could not be simpler. Tell OpenNMS what IP address ranges to discover and what community strings (or SNMPv3 USM users and passphrases) to use. Once the nodes finish scanning, SNMP data collection automagically begins for MIB objects that the system knows about. After a couple of data collection cycles, you'll have beautiful graphs of all this data.
When SNMP is not an option, there are still many options for both monitoring ("are all the servers answering requests?") and data collection ("what kind of traffic are we seeing on the DSL line?"). The latest release has an HTTP collector that you can configure to pull stats from devices that lack SNMP support but have a web interface, such as many DSL / cable modems and SOHO routers. There is also a page sequence monitor for testing "chained" web pages. For more complex tests or custom applications, you can wrap any existing test scripts you have in a bit of code that implements the interface contract for the General Purpose poller monitor.
As for time invested, OpenNMS is like any other sophisticated tool -- you get out of it what you put into it. If you just want to watch services and collect data, it will do that with almost no configuration. But take the red pill, and you'll find that the rabbit-hole is bottomless and full of things you never thought possible. The people who use and develop OpenNMS come from many backgrounds, bringing a great diversity of experience and needs. If you can think of it, somebody has probably made OpenNMS do it.