This week I was happy to see this white paper by Jane Curry a certified Tivoli Consultant and Instructor. Her Open Source Management Options paper compared OpenNMS, Nagios and my favorite network monitoring software, Zenoss Core. Part of the reason I love Zenoss is that I have been involved with the project for over two years and have watched our user community grow (Also and am employed by Zenoss Inc. as their VP of Community and the paycheck helps spread the love;).
The paper is a very thorough comparison of three popular open source monitoring packages. Her analysis was very gratifying since she gave Zenoss the nod. (though to be fair, she didn’t care for OpenNMS’ Java architecture due to personal choice) Otherwise it was a pretty close call:
OpenNMS and Zenoss are both extremely competent products covering automatic discovery, availability monitoring, problem management and performance management and reporting. Zenoss has some topology mapping and has better documentation but the code feels less reliable. OpenNMS currently has a rather messy architecture around events, alarms and notifications, though this is said to be under review. I also struggle to believe that you have to recycle the whole of OpenNMS if you have changed a configuration file!
Also I want to offer my congratulations to the OpenNMS guys for getting praise on their solution they’ve worked hard and have a nice product. It’s also satisfying to see a Tivoli expert acknowledge open source solutions as an alternative to well respected solutions like Tivoli.
As a follow-on John and Coté had Jane as a guest on their podcast to discuss her findings, I highly recommend the IT Management Guys podcast for a good discussion.
Normally I don’t post stuff like this but here’s a cool holiday offer from MindTouch, the makers of open source wiki and social collaboration software, deki. They will donate and adopt, from the World Wildlife Fund, an emperor penguin in any company’s name when they upgrade to MindTouch Standard or Enterprise license from an existing Deki Open Source installation.
I like the free and open source deki and have a couple accounts on their wiki hosting site— Wik.is. However after asking their CEO, Aaron “WildMan” Fulkerson, what’s the advantage of buying he gave me the list:
Stable build–Deki Commercial build is the only edition recommended for production environments
Desktop Suite–Publish from Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word and benefit from the MindTouch Desktop Connector, which delivers drag-and-drop capabilities to your Microsoft Windows desktop
Enterprise adapters to enable business automation–Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Salesforece, SugarCRM and much more…
So the reason I mentioned the promotion is I like the buy something get something free marketing but only when there’s something cool or useful. I dig penguins so nothing better than saving a clumsy, bottom heavy guy in black (not unlike myself).
[Disclosure: I am an advisor to MindTouch Inc. but have no financial agreement with them whatso-ever, I just like the way they roll.]
I was going through my email today and found a recent email from Matt Rechenburg of OpenQRM who just released OpenQRM version 4.2. In the latest addition OpenQRM has support for provisioning server images in the cloud.
Here’s the list of features:
This new version comes with additional support for VMware ESX, an integration with Puppet for automated configuration management, improvements for the high-availability mechanism and, last but not least, a Cloud-plugin. This new Cloud-plugin provides a fully automated private cloud with a separated Cloud portal for external data-center users to submit their requests to. The Cloud-plugin features a complete automated provisioning cycle including automatic de-provisioning, Deployment of physical and virtual machines from different virtualization types, P2V, V2P, V2V, P2P, “Clone-on-deploy” and a billing system.
Here’s a video demo for the latest version of OpenQRM, it’s pretty impressive.
OpenQRM isn’t the only OSS project receiving a lot of attention as a cloud tool, Enomaly and Puppet both have been getting some media attention from Ostatic and Information Week among others. I think all these projects have a bright future.
One of my favorite business authors, David Meerman Scott, is running a contest on his blog in relation to his discussion of the book, The Cool Factor by Del Breckenfeld. His little contest comes with a very cool prize, a guitar signed by Billy F. Gibbons of ZZ Top.
The goal is to define cool in two sentences or less. So here’s my shot at glory and a wicked cool guitar.
Cool is an intangible aesthetic tempered by eccentricity colored by indifference.
Congratulations to The Pitt Rugby Club that won its 4th ARU Championship in 7 years last weekend with a 24-17 win over Slippery Rock University. Pitt became champions by winning the game and scoring a bonus point (4 trys scored) to top WVU by one point in the SLS system.
Back in 1990 I was one of the original re-founding fathers of the club after a 8 year forced hiatus (see the picture below to find out why). It’s great to see the team I helped start come so far. Our inaugural season was pretty ugly, I think only a handful of us had ever played rugby before that season and many of us as ex-football players had a bad habit of blocking for the runner(a penalty in rugby). Now Pitt is a perennial league contender. It’s great to see the boys doing so well. Some day I am going to get in shape and go back in play in the alumni game.
I am a technology junkie, with a penchant for open source, social media, and most things Web 2.0 (though I really hate that term).
I feel strongly that you own your own words.
This blog is written by Mark Hinkle and does not represent the opinions
of my employer (Zenoss Inc.),
or anyone else
About Socialized Software
Socialized Software is a discussion of how Internet communication and technology is amplifying the individual talents of people to produce open source software, share ideas, and market products.
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