I contacted the authors of two popular open source projects and interviewed them.
by Alex Goldman
Nagios
Nagios Enterprises LLC and its president Ethan Galstead are going through some changes. Galstead syas he started the Nagios project outside of work in 1999 and in 2005, he realized he could support himself by working full time on the project. Now, he’s moved the project out of a home office and into rented office space.
As I reach him, he’s in his new office, arraging the new furniture and recovering from a winter cold.
In September of 2009, Nagios released Nagios XI, the commercial version of its Nagios Core open source network management software. “There will always be the free version,” Galstead says.
The commercial version incorporates the most popular community add ons to Nagios, including one of the graphical interfaces, but Galstead says that users of the open source version have access to the same add-ons.
In addition to the graphical interface, a popular add on is a graphing engine, which gives Nagios some of the graphing capabilities of Cacti. However, Galstead also admitted that many people use both Nagios and Cacti and that the two projects have a small amount of overlap.
Galstead says that people use open source products because they can add their own features. Many ISPs that use Nagios have written a script to check the border router and if the link is down, Nagios can power cycle the router automatically, but “anyone who’s running an ISP has done that kind of thing before, whether they use Nagios or something else.”
Galstead thinks that WISPA members may be interested to learn about MRTS out of Denmark, a custom version of the popular MRTG graphing engine that uses RRDTool to provide graphs over time. ISPs, of course, want to track monthly usage, and this tool can help.
Galstead says that many ISPs use Nagios in conjunction with a log manager like Syslog-ng. Commercial customers have asked for a feature that would allow Nagios to manage recurring downtime for some network elements.
WISPA members provided me with several questions, and one of those was how well Nagios LLC is doing with paid support. Galstead said that the reaction has not been as positive as he’d hoped, and he suspects that many large businesses feel they don’t need premium support because they already have some of the best tech people in the business. So while premium support is not raking in the cash, Galstead finds that the commercial version of Nagios is being received well.
Galstead says that he appreciates the value of tech savvy users of open source software. “People like ISPs take Nagios to the edge of what it can do. Without people like that, open source projects don’t improve or evolve.”
Back when he started Nagios, Galstead says he wanted to return a favor. “I used Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, and the free C compiler. I wanted to give back to the open source community.”
Servers Alive
I reach Dirk Bulinckx, the author of Servers Alive, by e-mail at his home in the Netherlands. His company uses the .nu TLD, which is popular in Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands, according to wikipedia.
Bulinckx and Nancy Brans, his wife, founded the company in 1993. They use the face of their first Saint Bernard, Sanctus van de Burggravehoeve, as the logo of their company, Woodstone. Today, Bulickx writes, they have 11 dogs, two of whom are Saint Bernards but Sanctus van de Burggravehoeve died years ago.
Servers Alive provides network monitoring and alerts. It also incorporates basic graphical data presentation.
The goal of the product is to be basic and functional. “In our idea the network admin knows his network and wants to have a package that can help him with as many options as possible. That’s why Servers Alive has a lot built-in (not like Nagios were most is something extra that has to be added). That’s also why SA doesn’t have a network scanner like WhatsUp.”
“Servers Alive started small and very quickly (in days to be exact) we got a lot of feedback from users and directly we made changes based on their requirements. Servers Alive is what it is thanks to all the feedback we got from our users. Most of the new features that we put in the product are based on questions of our users. Compared to WhatsUp our price is much lower. Compared to Nagios our support is quicker and user get via support a direct contact with the developpers not with ‘just’ some support person,” Bulickx writes.
Like Nagios, Servers Alive has many community add ons. Bulinckx writes that the most popular are “the COM based EVENTLOG checker and the COM based MAILFLOW checker (SMTP2POP3).”
Bulinckx is surprised that IPv6 is not yet widely used. It’s the one feature he worked hard to incorporate into Servers Alive that is not widely used today.
He re-emphasizes that Woodstone responds to customers. “Most of our users are thrilled about the speed of response they get whenever there is a support question.”
Tags: nagios, network management, servers alive
