Little acorns of open source IT management

Monday, October 9, 2006 by admin

I’ve been looking into open source IT management offerings recently (though not in as much detail as Cote), for a number of reasons. No, I don’t believe we should paint the whole world with open source, particularly as it appears more and more to be a business-driven alternative to traditional sourcing, rather than any “power to the people” software strategy. Instead, I look to open source as a way of thrashing out the commodity layer of software, as the community at large takes it upon itself to build something everyone can use. Linux, Apache, MySQL are all good examples of this.

And so it is with management software. One would hope that event management is a solved problem by now, as is asset management; until quite recently however, the only open source offerings have been at quite a low level, for log management for example. I was therefore interested to read about OneCMDB, an open source Configuration Management Database implementation written in Java. Interested because, what could be more of a commodity for systems management than the repository for managing IT assets? Just as with the relationship between MySQL and its data, the value of the repository comes from the information it contains.

OneCMDB has only just been released; it is not currently designed for enterprise use; documentation is currently sparse; and the chances are it will hit scalability problems if it is used in too hefty an environment. The point is, to me at least, that open source attention is turning to what was previously an area of little interest. There are few comments on Sourceforge, but one is from another developer that is already looking at integrating OneCMDB with his own, in-house service desk application. From such little acorns, we might at least expect to see a sapling or two in the future.

One of the really great things about open source is that sometimes, it ups the ante: Linux did it with the once-complacent Windows, for example. The IT management software bandwagon has traditionally lumbered along, lets hope that a few more initiatives like this one might help crack the whip a little. There have been some good signs of progress in the enterprise management software community, particularly around standardisation but a little more impetus wouldn’t hurt a bit.

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