The Packet Scoop

There are several ways to approach NMS and associated, but what I see are four general categories.

1. Open Source Projects

2. Open Source Hybrid

3. High End Commercial

4. Do it Yourself Commercial

The pure free open source plays like Nagios and OpenNMS are robust and full-featured systems, with just about every bell and whistle that any Network Engineer or System Administrator would want. Most importantly, they have a fairly simple plug-in development process. For most situations, if you need to monitor something that the systems do not already support, then you can write a very simple shell script and return one of a series of predefined parameters. And there you have it, your own custom plug-in.

Even though these systems are relatively mature open-source products, IT departments have to spend an inordinate amount of time configuring scripts, defining services and network objects and creating reports virtually from scratch. Get used to the command line if you decide on an open source solution. If you’re a scripter and implementor, have “installation patience”, and don’t mind the hours (not to mention the cost of those hours), then open source is for you. Caution on the support side though, as it comes in the form of sometimes arcane feedback from newsgroups, forums and the open source project itself. Very often open source is nothing more than a common starting point for a home-brew, do-it-yourself, custom solution. After weeks of customization, your implementation will look nothing like the ‘generic’ open source tool.

• Open Source Hybrid

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 (MRTG) 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 roll-outs. 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. 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. Be careful, though, these solutions are typically based on Nagios or OpenNMS, and come with many of the complexities of open source generally. Often you will be compiling a set of disparate tools directly from source code (most of these hybrid solutions simply bundle a bunch of open source tools without doing any deep integration between the tools). For that reason open source hybrid management products may not offer the benefits you expect.

As mentioned above, solutions from high end vendors usually come with expensive price tags and complexity that only Einstein could crack. These vendors basically provide Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for the IT department. It’s expensive, difficult to maintain, and complex. That being said, if you’re Ford Motor Company, there are few options in the marketplace. If you’re the rest of us, there are lots of options.

If you’re a middle market company, these systems aren’t for you. If your predecessor already installed one, and you’re a company with less than 5000 nodes, I’m betting that you’re not getting full value.

It reminds me of a story I once heard told by Bill Parcells, the famous NFL coach. When he took over the NY Giants in the early 80s the team was in disarray. He decided he needed to clean house. So, within a month of his hiring he actually fired every coach in the organization. But he didn’t stop there. He also fired the staff at the training complex, the trainers, the doctors, and everyone in the administrative offices. He even fired the ball boys! If you’ve got less than 5,000 nodes and your predecessor installed OpenView or a similar product, and you know it’s not working for you, build a business case and find yourself something more suited to your needs. Sometimes cutting your losses and starting over is the optimal path. Status quo is easy. Getting to high performance and efficiency takes work.

Do-it-yourself commercial vendors include SolarWinds, AdventNet, and scores of others. These vendors are typically easy to work with, have reasonably priced solutions, and offer decent, although unbalanced and unpredictable support. Purchasing is just a click away, and you don’t have to deal with an in-your-face sales personality pushing their utopic solution on you. The challenge with these products is finding the right vendor to work with. With hundreds of options on the market, it’s tough to vet through the noise, evaluate alternatives, and make a decision without wondering if the next product you evaluate will be better than the previous. Furthermore, most of these vendors are strong in one area and weak in others. In fact, even inside the ‘suites’ of tools provided by these vendors there is little or no integration. Often the user interfaces provided by each tool are completely different and one simple ‘task’ requires you to launch three or four ‘tools’ inside a suite and cut and paste data between tools. The lack of integration between tools seems like this is the whole problem you were trying to solve by moving away from open source!

Each of the four categories above make selecting the right approach more than an overnight decision. You’ll want to do your homework, and think it through. The good news is that this blog is dedicated to helping you make that decision. This blog will report the good with the bad, and continue to be a watchdog on the sometimes ambitious claims of vendors.