451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Cloud monitoring keeps open source in cool crowd
Jay Lyman, April 7, 2010 @ 6:00 pm ETOne of the first special reports I wrote for 451 Group was an analysis of the open source systems management vendors on the scene — GroundWork, Hyperic, Zenoss, OpenNMS Group, Nagios Enterprises and some others. These named ones are those that made it and while there was some reckoning in the market and there have been changes, it is interesting to see these players still plugging away, pushing into new markets and powering open source for systems, network and application monitoring and management, including cloud computing environments.
When acquired by SpringSource a year ago, there was some question as to the real value of open source systems monitoring and management company Hyperic, which had taken the most pronounced and aggressive move toward the cloud. Flash forward to VMware’s latest SpringSource tc Server release and we see VMware, at the very least, still sees technical and market value in Hyperic, which continues to be its cloud appliation and infrastructure monitoring technology and brand. Hyperic and its acquisition by SpringSource also served as an early milestone in the devops trend.
As for GroundWork Open Source, the company just made an announcement for monitoring private clouds created with Eucalyptus Systems, which continues to gain buzz and attention itself with its recent hiring of former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos. The GroundWork-Eucalyptus joint offering, intended to provide one point of control for datacenters and cloud computing environments both private and public, is also intended for channel partners (which represent about half of GroundWork’s revenue) to offer Eucalyptus-based private clouds with monitoring as well.
Zenoss is another vendor that continues to leverage open source for systems management that is finding continued interest and traction in large part thanks to emergent models and strategies in cloud computing. In its case, Zenoss announced it will provide service assurance monitoring for private and public clouds based on Cisco’s Unified Computing System. The beta service promises enterprises and service providers fast and cost effective deployment of a unified operations console for UCS services, which could include physical, virtual and/or cloud computing environments.
There are also others that are still growing in the enterprise systems monitoring and management space with open source software: Nagios Enterprises and OpenNMS Group in particular. Nagios Enterprises, which shares the same name as the popular open source monitoring project, continues to grow its enterprise and cloud presence despite a fork and check on its development last year.
OpenNMS Group, among the most community and project-oriented of the open source commercial plays in systems management, is part of an interesting effort toward a cloud service broker (CSB), aimed at enabling service providers to connect to various cloud providers, along with British Telecom and others.
Given much of the efficiency and rewards of cloud computing center on driving greater utilization and efficiency, it is not surprising that monitoring is a big part of it. Given the trend toward using open source pieces for cloud computing, particularly as we consider the current wave of investment and building of private cloud infrastructures where open source is very well-suited, it is not surprising to see open source a big part of it, too.
Comments (7) Categories: Software
It’s worth pointing out that the announcements you reference from Zenoss and GWOS applies only to the commercially licensed “enterprise” versions of the companies’ respective products. The Hyperic / SpringSource tc Server product also appears to be commercially licensed, though the developer edition is offered as a no-cost (albeit apparently not open-source) download.
That’s true, Jeff. The main point of the post centers on the commercial business and commercial partnerships of these open source-focused vendors, given a year ago we were seeing some skepticism of their commercial viability (when SpringSource acquired Hyperic in May 2009). We appreciate your point, though. Thanks for posting.
JL
I would also point out that Zenoss Community just released a bunch of software for the cloud under the GPLv2. Monitoring plugins for the libvirt (virtualization library to monitor virtually every type of virtual infrastructure), Google App Engine, Redis NOSQL database, VMware ESXi, AMQP, and integrations with Puppet configuration management). Zenoss Inc. also released Amazon EC2 monitoring last fall and Xen monitoring to give a pretty broad and growing free and open source offering:
http://community.zenoss.org/community/zenpacks?view=tags&tags=cloud
Mark, don’t you get tired of having to point out what is GPL and what is “enterprise”?
I’ll let Mark respond for himself, but I would add here that differentiation between the open source project (and GPL code) and commercial offerings was cited by vendors as one of the main challenges of sales and marketing for open source software. So Mark may get tired of it, but it’s kind of his job
. I think it is a reality of commercial open source. For those with a purely open source and free code strategy/approach, it may not be as big of a challenge, but that also comes with its own commercialization/monetization challenges, such as embedding or OEM use of the software.
JL
David,
I mainly have to do that for a small group of nice but cantankerous chaps in Pittsboro,NC. It seems like our tens of thousands of community members and the rest of the world get the distinction just fine
Since Zenoss Core is so good I find that I spend very little time defending it.
I do feel bad since it seems that you are often “confused”. I would be glad to make you some crib sheets or something to help you out. Given your level of interest I might start to think you are looking for a new NMS solution, it’s free for you to download, redistribute, support etc. from SourceForge – http://sourceforge.net/projects/zenoss/ .
Also I would love to make some notes of my own I always wonder how OpenNMS can be GPL but included in Raritan’s commercial proprietary products. If you could get me some Cliffs Notes on that I would be much obliged. It sounds like dual-licensing fauxopen-source stuff to me but I am not quite bright enough to figure it out
Seriously though I think the best answer for anyone who is confused is to download Zenoss and any other open source solution and see if it meets there needs best. If there’s value in buying support, service, training and other features I am sure as many others have they will open their checkbooks for the appropriate commercial offerings.
For those of you following this thread and don’t realize that I do like Dave and the OpenNMS Group and wish them the best of luck with their project. It’s really those commercial suites from the Big 4 that you have to watch out for.
Mark is right: every user should try multiple platforms and use the one that works best for the individual case. Educate yourself just as you would when making any important decision.
In particular, when choosing a vendor-supported open-source product, be aware of the vendor’s motivations and the long-term costs associated with using the platform. If commercially-licensed extensions exist, talk to a salesperson — even if you don’t imagine you would ever purchase them — and ask uncomfortable questions. How is the license structured? Is it possible to purchase a support agreement without purchasing the commercial extensions? Do you lose the right to use the commercial parts if you don’t renew every year? Remember that Free and Open Source software is about your freedom to use, modify, redistribute, and fork the software; if you buy the commercial extensions, does the license agreement place any restrictions on your freedom to do these things with the open-source portion of the product?