How time flies.

It has been six years since I wrote about Network management’s “new wave” and thought it would be interesting to go back and see what has happened. We are now at the outer envelope of the VC funding cycle so things should be sorting themselves out one way or another.

The “new wave” was Hyperic, Zenoss and Groundwork Open Source VC funded, open source network management companies.

Open source wasn’t new to the network management scene in 2007, there had been well known projects, like Nagios, MRTG and OpenNMS, around for a number of years prior to that.

What was different was combining open source licensing with big wads of venture capital. A total of $79.2M has been invested into the “new wave” over the last 9 years.

What has been the effect on network management software of the combinaton of open source licensing and oodles of venture capital?

Current state of play

My first impression is that not much has changed. Let’s dig a little deeper and see.

Hyperic was founded in 2004 and purchased by SpringSource in 2009 after having raised a total of $9.9M in two rounds of fund raising.

Zenoss was founded in 2005 and has raised a total of $40.8M in three rounds over the last eight years, the most recent being in September 2012 when Zenoss raised a further $25M.

Groundwork Open Source was founded in 2004 and has raised a total of $28.5M in four rounds, the most recent being in October 2009 when Groundwork raised $5M.

Are they still open

Looks like Groundwork isn’t that open. Groundwork Monitor Core product is restricted to 50 devices. The license doesn’t look at all open.

The open source moniker has gone. Hard to tell that, say Zenoss for instance, is actually open source by looking at their home page. If you were an alien just off the mother ship and only had the home page to look at, you wouldn’t know that the core product is open source.

Effects upon closed source competitors

I suggested that the “new wave” would have the effect of opening up the “big 4″. I can see no evidence of this at all. I also thought that the “big 4″ would be good candidates to buy the “new wave” and that hasn’t happened either.

Effects upon consumers

The one big winner has been users. Open source network management software ten years ago could be hard work with no proper packaging and woeful documentation. Now, there are some really nice options that are much easier to work with. There are also large communities as well to offer support and guidance where necessary.

Conclusion

I find it hard to believe that too many people would consider the “new wave” experiment to be a major success story. I’m not saying it has failed, but venture capitalists invest money to win big, and the investment hasn’t won big. It probably didn’t help that the financial meltdown happened.

There are a number of winners, not least among the many users who have high quality software to use at minimal cost.

I doubt that venture capitalists will be rushing to find their cheque books to fund another round of open source network management companies.

Had the same wave of money been invested in closed source companies doing the same thing I’d bet that they would have been more successful in strictly money terms at least. If a user jumps on board your ecosystem for the sole reason they can get your core offering for free, is that user going to be worth the same in the long term as a customer who literally bought into the ecosystem? My expectation is that they are not.

I am not saying that open source businesses aren’t perfectly viable businesses. It just means they may not be as profitable as an equivalent closed source business. And money in the end of the day is what venture capitalists are interested in.

Found an interesting old post by John E. Vincent, Why Monitoring Sucks tweeted by MonkChips. What is interesting is what John did next. He created a GitHub account so that he could collaborate with people to rectify the problem.

The most interesting part (to me anyway) is the tools-repos repository in which all of the different monitoring tools are listed.

Enjoy!

PS: as a counter point, read this post entitled #monitoringlove – a true story by Ulf Månsson.

It has taken 20 years as a professional programmer to get to this point, but I have finally taken the final step to continuous delivery.

We’ve been practicing continuous integration for well over a year now. It seemed a logical step to deploy the software automatically. When a process is done manually you tend to make a lot of mistakes. I did anyway. I’d run the database upgrade script before the new one had been installed and of course I would take a long time performing the upgrade. The machine is able to do the upgrade in a matter of a few seconds, I used to take several heart thumping minutes to do the same job.

Continuous integration involves building and running tests on each change. Each time we change the software, TeamCity pulls the software from the repo and builds it, then runs the unit tests. If either the build fails or any of the tests fail, then TeamCity lets the culprit know via email so they can fix it.

Every night at 10pm TeamCity takes all of the changes from the day and runs all of the tests, the unit tests again and the integration tests.

The unit tests are fast running single aim tests with very few dependencies and the integration tests exercise pretty much the whole stack end-to-end. Typically, you are going to have quite a lot more unit tests than integration tests.

If the nightly build is successful, TeamCity then kicks off a deployment to our dev server.

Until fairly recently, automated deployment was quite a painful business in the .NET world. Microsoft have a solution for deploying ASP.Net websites but we found it to be unsatisfactory for our requirements. We use Octopus Deploy for managing the deployment process.

Octopus Deploy provides a nice web based console to help you visualize and manage the release process. We maintain a release pipeline of dev, stage and production but the specific workflow is quite flexible. The TeamCity nightly build process pushes the newly built software into the dev server. The developers are then able to test the software on dev and when we believe a feature is working we push it to the stage server. That’s when the wider company can get involved in testing the feature. When satisfied that the feature is working on stage, we then push the release into production.

Apart from the initial TeamCity push to dev, the process is adminstered manually. You tell Octopus to push the software to stage and then production. But, the actual deployment process is automatic. And crucially, the software deployed further down the pipeline is exactly the same software you were testing earlier in the process.

What are the benefits of continuous delivery?

• Fewer failed deployments – if you manually deploy, you will make mistakes;
• Greater code coverage – even without automating tests you are ensuring that each part of your product is being tested. Of course, it is best to automate a lot of the testing but there are always going to be parts of the software that are tricky to get to. Auto deployment can help you test these parts. For instance, the Xsensior Live database layer code does not yet have any integration tests, but because we auto deploy I know that the database update script is being executed at least twice prior to it being run against the production database. So, I have a reasonable amount of confidence that the upgrade will work as expected.

The last thing you want as a software developer, is for your customer to do your testing for you. Continuous delivery helps you exercise your product before your customers. Never a bad thing.

I finally got around to posting the TimeTag source code up on Google Code GitHub this afternoon. You can find the project here.

Whilst I’ve no intention of working on TimeTag, I figured that it would be useful for people learning PowerShell development to have a reasonably large sample available, and useful for someone to have a help up if they wanted to implement something similar and don’t fancy starting from scratch.

Feel free to fork…

Update June 2013: moved the code over to GitHub to make things easier to fork.

Highlights from Planet Network Management for Week 22.

• High-tech careers, IT cost management and cloud computing – the emergence of cloud computing in the last few years has created demand for cloud based skills in the job market
• Managing Amazon EC2 nodes with Puppet – how to create easily create manageable Amazon EC2 instances
• The 15 most massive data breaches: An interesting analysis by Focus – an analysis of the 15 most serious data centre security breaches
• Hyperic 4.3 now released – a new version of Hyperic has been released featuring improved SNMP v3 support and richer Windows Event Logging
• OpenNMS: Sourceforge Project of the Month – June 2010 – OpenNMS voted “project of the month” on SourceForge
• Nagios Seedcamp Kicks Off – Nagios announces a competition to write the best plugin
• Demystifying The Cloud – an introduction to cloud computing
• iPRTG in a Completely New Version – Beta Testers Wanted – beta testers are wanted for the new version of iPRTG, an iPhone app for using PRTG
• WIFI Diagnostics from Windows 7 or Vista Command Prompt (by Tony Fortunato)
  – how to diagnose wireless connectivity issues using tools built into Windows 7 and Windows Vista

Highlights from Planet Network Management for Week 21.

• Location based Traffic Reports – GeoLocations in NetFlow Analyzer
  – how GEO location of your IP addresses can help you manage your network
• Measuring Application Utilization with Wireshark – how to track an applications network usage using Wireshark
• Over 2 years of #mollom satisfaction – 2 years of a spam free website
• Astronomy and Summary Indexing – how Splunk was useful analysing astronomy data
• Is your key IT talent planning to quit in 2010? – after the recession a lot of IT people are planning to leave their employer
• Top 3 Correlation techniques for Real-time IT Operations – techniques for correlating events and reducing alert duplication

Highlights from Planet Network Management for Week 20.

• The Fastest way for Analyzing Network Spikes – NetFlow Analyzer – how to analyse network traffic spikes in near real time
• OpenNMS 1.6.11 and OpenNMS 1.7.90 Released – new versions of both the development and stable releases of OpenNMS
• Network Security Review – CACE Pilot – a review of CACE Pilot software
• op5 Monitor on Android and iPhone – OP5 now has a handy client running on iPhone and Android based phones
• ntop and Plixer Partnered for Advanced Flow-based Monitoring – Plixer has teamed up with nProbe in Italy
• “Real World” Performance Comparison of CDN (Content Delivery Network) Providers – a comparison of the various CDN networks with some surprising results

Highlights from Planet Network Management for Week 19.

• RiverMuse Announces New Commercial Product – RiverMuse announces the release of RiverMuse Pro v2.0
• Bug #3000000 – Pandora FMS is honoured to have bug #3000000 on SourceForge
• Datacenter Barometer: Building a Cloud Ark for the Coming Data Flood – with the volume of data currently being produced where is it all going to be stored?
• Icinga introduces… Scott Evans (Icinga Marketing/Testing) – Interview with Scott Events
• SHARKFEST’10 Wireshark Developer and User Conference (by Joke Snelders) – The Wireshark conference is just a month away…
• Extending ntop using Python – NTop can now be extended using Python
• Spiceworks 4.7: Small Release, Big Impact on IT – late last week SpiceWorks released Spiceworks 4.7

Highlights from Planet Network Management for Week 18.

• Europe 2010 – OUCE Day 1 – Tarus Balog’s commentary on day one of the OpenNMS European Conference in Frankfurt, Germany
• Whats New in NetFlow Analyzer 8 !! – ManageEngine announce the release of version 8 of their NetFlow Anaylzer product
• Happy Birthday Icinga and THANK YOU ALL! – Icinga celebrates its first birthday
• 10 Gbit PF_RING-based Hardware Packet Filtering and Balancing Previewed at the Intel Europe Conference – Luca Deri and Joseph Gasparakis preview the new PF_RING-based technology they have co-developed that allows Linux users to fully exploit the hardware capabilities of the newest Intel X520 10 Gbit adapter
• Flash is Dead — and so is Client-side Java – why Monolith Software won’t be using Flash or Java
• Wireshark 1.2.8, 1.0.13, and 1.3.5 Released – a whole load of new Wireshark releases…
• Spiceworks at Interop: Then and Now – Spiceworks comparing their first attendance at Interop in 2008 with the latest one in 2010

Highlights from Planet Network Management for Week 17.

• Detecting Trojan and Worm with Capsa Network Analyzer – how to detect trojans and worm infections using a packet capture tool
• Review of Dualcomm 5-Port Pass-Through Port Mirroring Switch (by Betty DuBois) – a review of Dualcomm Technology’s 5-Port 10/100/1000 PoE pass-through port mirroring switch
• Splunk for WebSphere Application Servers – using Splunk to monitor the health of WebSphere
• 7 Key Considerations for Managing Exchange Server Health and Status – advice for managing Microsoft Exchange
• Zabbix, the book – if you want to get the most out of Zabbix, get the Zabbix book!
• Best of Breed vs. Framework: Why Frameworks Don’t Work for Mid Market Customers – Rivermuse outline why framework products aren’t ideal for medium sized companies
• Upcoming OpenNMS Events – events where you can find the folks at OpenNMS in attendance