Savvy Interop attendees this week walked away from the show in Las Vegas with more than a pocket full of USB flash drives and retractable Ethernet cables - they also took home free software.

From network monitoring tools to Internet filters to Office-like applications, vendors took the price tags off their tools for Interop shoppers. Companies such as GroundWork Open Source, Blue Coat Systems, Splunk and ThinkFree took enterprise features and scaled them down for smaller deployments to get network managers started with their tools.

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"It is still a fairly significant effort for an IT person to get a network monitoring tool working in their environment. We did the integration work with other freeware tools to help them get started easier," says Harper Mann, a member of GroundWork Open Source's senior technical staff. GroundWork last year launched a commercial monitoring package based on Nagios open source code, but it remains close to its open source roots. "Organizations are continually trying to move dollars from areas that are not their core competency."

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To ease the deployment of its open source application, the company worked to make GroundWork Monitor Open Source compatible with other popular freeware tools such as MySQL, PHP and Nagios 2.0. GroundWork also added a graphical user interface and clustering capabilities to enable customers to mirror network monitoring.

The software runs on a Linux server with memory in disk, and GroundWork included in this free version real-time status views, historic trend reporting and an alerting system. This version supports a number of servers, operating systems, routers and other network devices, and GroundWork Monitor Open Source users have access to GroundWork-sponsored support forums. The application is available under an open source software license.

Splunk, another relative newcomer to the management market, used Interop to let attendees know about the freeware version of its enterprise data indexing and troubleshooting software. Splunk's software runs on Linux, Unix including Solaris, and Mac OS X, and the freeware version offers users up to 500MB of data indexing per day. The software searches for management data across logs, message queues, configuration files, SNMP traps and database transactions to more quickly correlate events that could be related to a failure -- and that network managers would typically have to search manually.

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