Kings of Open Source Monitoring

“Network monitoring is a fact of life for IT departments.
Monitoring software ranges from simple ICMP-based scripts for
up/down monitoring to midrange products like SolarWinds to high-end
offerings such as HP’s OpenView and IBM’s Tivoli — all of which
have their drawbacks. Simpler monitoring systems don’t provide
enough information about your network, while the feature-laden
high-end systems can be prohibitively expensive. At the same time,
midrange systems might not scale well for monitoring large
networks.

“Two network monitoring systems with open source roots, OpenNMS
and Zenoss, provide a bevy of features at a lower (or no) cost than
their high-end competitors, and can scale to monitor large numbers
of network nodes. Both solutions compete with large commercial
systems such as OpenView and Tivoli. They are advanced systems
capable of monitoring a wide variety of network devices. OpenNMS is
completely open source, while Zenoss offers Core, a free open
source edition that can be extended with free Zenoss- and
community-built add-ons.”

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