Network management goes open source

Despite vendors' best efforts, the perception of network and systems management products is that many are high-priced, require lengthy deployment cycles, entail multiple integration efforts and necessitate time-consuming customization.

But open source vendors and developers are bringing a new breed of products to market that could shatter that perception and provide customers with inexpensive, flexible and easy-to-integrate management tools. Freeware applications such as Multi Router Traffic Grapher and Big Brother have been around for decades in a majority of IT departments as tools users turn to when commercial products can't deliver, but because of scalability and support concerns, the applications rarely take off in enterprise-wide rollouts.

Today's open source tools have been commercialized by vendors such as GroundWork, Hyperic and others, which also provide customers with support and maintenance contracts that often aren't part of a freeware or shareware deployment. And while these tools aren't free, they don't carry the $1 million price tag of a BMC Patrol, Computer Associates Unicenter, HP OpenView or IBM Tivoli - and according to early adopters, open source management products can offer atypical benefits.

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Despite vendors' best efforts, the perception of network and systems management products is that many are high-priced, require lengthy deployment cycles, entail multiple integration efforts and necessitate time-consuming customization.

But open source vendors and developers are bringing a new breed of products to market that could shatter that perception and provide customers with inexpensive, flexible and easy-to-integrate management tools. Freeware applications such as Multi Router Traffic Grapher and Big Brother have been around for decades in a majority of IT departments as tools users turn to when commercial products can't deliver, but because of scalability and support concerns, the applications rarely take off in enterprise-wide rollouts.

Today's open source tools have been commercialized by vendors such as GroundWork, Hyperic and others, which also provide customers with support and maintenance contracts that often aren't part of a freeware or shareware deployment. And while these tools aren't free, they don't carry the $1 million price tag of a BMC Patrol, Computer Associates Unicenter, HP OpenView or IBM Tivoli - and according to early adopters, open source management products can offer atypical benefits.

"The financial benefits of open source are simply a byproduct of the real gain it offers us. We can control our time to market to our customers using open source," says Andres Andreu, technical director of Web engineering and applications for advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather in New York.

Andreu uses Hyperic HQ to monitor Web servers and Web services across the firm's global infrastructure. He says about three years ago he went shopping for a management platform and didn't discover one tool to meet his needs - which included monitoring open source tools such as JBoss, Apache and MySQL. Because the IT shop at Ogilvy & Mather must work as quickly as its business counterparts, Andreu says he needed a product that he could quickly manipulate to meet his needs.

"The source code is available and it helps me write plug-ins to get the level of granularity I need," he says.

Hyperic HQ is actually a hybrid product of sorts - part open source and part proprietary technologies. Hyperic was spun out of Covalent, which focused on the security and support needs of the Apache Web Server, and Hyperic took Covalent Application Manager and broadened its reach to include the ability to manage the entire Web and open source infrastructure stack, says Javier Soltero, Hyperic CEO.

"Open source in general is still painful when it comes to the process of getting it rolled out, and customers are still in the migration process so we included both commercial and open source technologies," Soltero says. "We worked to get our install time down to a minimum."

Hyperic HQ is installed on a dedicated server and comes with a built-in database. Customers deploy agents on all managed machines, and the agents report back to the server only when conditions have changed or an alert is necessary. The software monitors various platforms ranging from Tomcat to Citrix to Apache to Linux to Solaris to Windows to VMware and more. The software delivers data and reports via a Web-based interface.