IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » Open Source Tools: "data" versus "information"

April 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Open Source Tools: "data" versus "information"

TAGS: Networking

In a recent Businessweek article, an IBM exec pointed out that "Today, the amount of information we produce increases by about 800 megabytes per year for every man, woman, and child on the planet." The article goes on to point out enterprises' ongoing need to translate "unstructured data" into truly useful "information."

This need to translate raw data into actual information is becoming a pretty critical issue for open source network and systems management projects today too.

Say you're looking for "information" on an open source network monitoring tool that would be good for your environment. The logical first step would be to go to SourceForge. So go there and search for "network monitor."

You get a ton of results, but which of these tools is the best for your environment? Good luck figuring that out, based on the search results. The most popular and proven open source network monitoring tool -- Nagios -- doesn't even appear in the first screen of the retrieved search results. In the open source discovery process, it's easy to find a lot of data, but not that easy to find the exact information that you need.

The old complaint around open source was that the documentation was lousy. People were quick to complain that open source is an engineering phenomena -- that the documentation was pointed towards open source hobbyists, not enterprise end users. For the end user that was used to unpacking a Dell box and finding crystal clear quick-start guides and troubleshooting menus, open source documentation was a little frightening.

The new news around open source documentation is that with the popularization of Wikis and other group sharing tools, the documentation has become dynamic. Documents even weeks old can be out of date given the speed of open source projects. Documentation is often written where user comments greatly enhance its usability. Project participants are actively submitting end user-oriented feedback, new entries and fixes to existing entries, which clarifies the documents and make them user-friendly. Wikis also play nicely with documentation processes such as indexing, which results in more standardized, intuitive information.

Open source has a new documentation problem today: its own popularity. The enterprise IT pro needs to have a better method to understand what's relevant for their unique requirements, and to let the rest of the data / noise fall away.

Posted by Harper Mann on April 25, 2006 03:16 PM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: