Open Source Network Management Solutions ExpandOpen Source Network Management Solutions Expand

Network management has been an ongoing challenge for many small and medium businesses. While many often need such tools, they have usually found them to be expensive, difficult to deploy, and hard to maintain. Open source solutions have been trying to address those problems and one vendor enhanced its system.Groundworks, whose customers include Crocs, Fox Media, and Nutrisystem, has been gaining traction in the network management space with its Groundwork Monitor product line, one in a growing number of open source network and system management solutions. To maintain its momentum, the company enhanced its line. The open source systems and network management software now works with Nagios 3.0.6, a popular open source computer system and network monitoring application that alert users when things go wrong. The Groundworks systems scalability has been increased: Groundworks Monitor Professional now monitors 750 devices (500 was the upper limit before) and the Groundworks Monitor Professional works with 6,000, twice as many as before. The system includes more sophisticated scheduling and notification for multi-time zone data center operations and better reporting functions. The new features are designed to help the vendor move up from small deployments to larger companies.

While Groundworks have been able to build a growing business by delivering an easy to use, inexpensive open source network management system, competition in this space has intensified Large suppliers, such as CA, HP, and IBM, have been retooling their systems to make them more attractive to small and medium companies. Other fledgling ventures, such as Hyperic, OpenNMS, Zabbix, and Zenoss, have focused on building open source solutions.

Not all of these ventures will be successful. The recent economic downturn could make it more difficult for companies to justify purchases of network and system management systems. So Groundworks as well as it competitors will be tested in the coming year. Additional enhancements will be needed to ensure that Groundwork Monitor continues to gain traction.