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“Does Management know you’re running open source management tools?”
By Jeff Parker - 10/6/2005

OpenWater recently visited with a large cellular provider. During the course of our meeting we found a peculiar, yet, nonetheless, common occurrence. This customer had purchased two of the Top five performance management solutions on the market with an investment of over a million dollars. It started to get interesting when the network engineer started showing us what he used to do his job. He didn’t pull up one of the big commercial tools that their IT Management Team invested heavily in. He pulled up Cacti – an open source performance management solution.

Of course we had to ask, “why aren’t you using the software that you paid so much money to acquire?” The response was once again one with which we’ve come to expect. “Oh that. It hasn’t been working since about two months after it was installed. It out-of-date, not working and no one maintains it.”

After meeting with this customer OpenWater spent some time reflecting on this event. Was this a unique occurrence? Unfortunately not. Over the course of the past year this has become a standard operating procedure. What do these companies have in common? Your cellular phone provider, the hospital serving your community, the stock exchange where your trades are executed, and your managed network services provider. Yes, besides the fact that they all provide services that we expect to work and be available for the good money that we pay them. How about the fact that they have all invested in excess of a million dollars on supposed high end management systems that they do not even use.

Is there a new trend among large companies when it comes to their network management solutions? Probably not. More like a dirty little secret that the company IT Executives would like to keep swept under the rug. These IT Execs either still believe or refuse to admit that the decision that they made 2-3 years ago to buy (insert company name here: UniCenter, Concord, InfoVista, HP OpenView, NetIQ, Micromuse) was a loser of an investment.

If you want the real low down on what is being used ask the folks responsible for supporting their IT infrastructures each and every day. They are using tools like WhatsUp Gold, MRTG, Cacti, IP Sentry, Big Brother, Nagios, Zabbix, and SolarWinds to make sure they stay out of hot water each day.

Do we infer from this that the cheapo or open source solutions are somehow better than the big marquee solutions? Not necessarily. Most of these project were skunk works projects. They came in under the radar to provide basic and required management functionality that their big ticket solutions were not providing. It’s not like these solutions were breaking new ground. They were providing basic functionality.

The problem that OpenWater keeps encountering is that when it comes time implement a management project the IT Executives look to the vendors that they have heard of – BMC, HP, NetIQ, CA, and IBM. They assume that these solutions must be good. We used them at the last company they were at or they are being written up by Gartner. They don’t consider the fact that the industry is riddled with failed implementations and millions of dollars of wasted investment.

Perhaps it’s time for a new approach. Define your requirements and implement a solution in phases. Put it the basics first. Make sure it works. Then add functionality as you move forward. Choose solutions that are easy to use and easy to maintain.

Where has the commercial industry gone to when so many customers use WhatsUp Gold and Cacti because "It does what it does, and i don't have to baby sit it". Maintainability should be the number one requirement for every piece of software, otherwise the investment might be wasted as shelfware.

Meanwhile, customers will continue to search for a "scalable" Cacti like solution that doesn’t sacrifice ease of use and configurability.

Sounds reasonable. Why do I feel like I must be dreaming?