Most would say that it really doesn’t matter if the solution is open source, from an established commercial vendor, or from a fledging startup. Most often what we care about is that the product lives up to what it claims, and that IT departments don’t spend afternoons on hold with vendor support or in forums getting answers to open source integration questions.
We think network management is a constant battle fighting too many devices, the wrong information, and too little predictive association before impending doom. Of course a list of devices and heart beat information is important, but what really matters is solving problems before they occur. This includes predictive symptomatic correlation between impending events, and displaying data in the proper actionable format. IT management, unfortunately, seems to be the epitome of garbage in / garbage out. There’s got to be a better way than installing OpenNMS or Nagios, customizing the crap out of it, only to find that it doesn’t do everything that really matters, and serves up a useless graph of trending garbage. Most importantly, after hours of installation, writing integration scripts, and building the perfect mousetrap we often realize only too late that only one poor soul in the IT department can untangle this crap – and if he gets hit by a bus – we’re in deep trouble. We want correlation, traps, alerts, etc, but mostly we want tools that deliver on the promise of comprehensive network management, regardless of free or commercial.
Seems to us that there’s either overly-complex, costly network/system management tools and platforms out there that over promise and under deliver, or there are technologies that are poorly supported, hard to maintain, and difficult to customize.
So, we’re setting out on a journey to explore the industry further and this blog is a journal of our findings. We admit that we’re peddling PacketTrap solutions, but we also vow to be objective – as objective as we can. We’ll look at open source, mid market do-it-yourself vendors like SolarWinds and Ipswitch, and of course the hybrids like Hyperic and Groundwork. Somewhere in the clutter there’s an answer.
