IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » December 2006

December 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Developer's Perspective on Wasted Time With Proprietary "Support"

TAGS: Open Source

One of the most agonizing IT troubleshooting pains is when you experience problems with a black box technology, then find yourself held hostage by the proprietary vendor's support system. In an interesting blog entry, one of the core developers in the open source Mule project -- Travis Carlson -- outlines his frustrations with proprietary support in a previous job, and explains the immediate support upside that a customer experiences when they go open source:

"Before I discovered high-quality open source software like Mule, vendor support had always been a sore subject for me. I had been working on a large application integration project for a network backbone provider in Latin America. Our IT department had purchased a "market-leading" very expensive proprietary integration software, with a hefty ongoing "support & maintenance" fee attached to it.

Of course, our first big support issue with the vendor surfaced as soon as we went about implementing their solution in our environment. It turned out that their JDBC connector did not fully support Oracle LOBs, which was an absolute necessity for our implementation. We filed a support request, and they eventually acknowledged the issue, but would not be able to provide a serious patch for about 4 months. Our system needed to be in production within 3 months, so we ended up developing an ugly workaround ourselves, which then, by the time the patch finally came out, remained in production for fear of "introducing entropy" into a system which had already gone through the Acceptance Testing phase (sigh).

And then there was the issue of wasting developers' precious time dealing with our vendor's support personnel.

If you've ever dealt with support from a large-scale vendor, you know how it goes. The first-level support guy often actually has less knowledge of the product than you do since you've been working with it day-in and day-out for weeks. Then the second-level support guy might have the same amount of knowledge about the product as you, but of course has no knowledge of your organization, IT environment, or business use cases. And then the third-level support (engineering) is generally inaccessible ("those guys should be insulated from support requests"), so you're left with filing an issue. At some point in time the engineers will eventually work on a patch, but the whole process (like the software itself) is a black box.

Once I discovered the alternative: enterprise-class open source software, which for Application Integration means Mule, the whole story changed.

With Mule, you have all the source code, and not just a periodic "export" of it, but the actual, bleeding-edge development tree. In addition to this, you have the JIRA database of outstanding issues, tasks, and new features. What that means is that if you want to know if any progress is being made on an issue, you can "watch it" in JIRA to see anyone has assigned it to him/herself, whether it's currently "In Progress," you can read comments by developers or other users on the issue, and comment on it yourself, which means a direct line of communication with the developer who is/will be working on the issue. You can check out the source code from Subversion and get updates as often as you want to see if anything has changed. And if you run into a deadline like we did with the Oracle JDBC issue, you can just fix the issue yourself in the actual source code, avoiding bottlenecks in your project timeline, get it into production, and then submit the fix to be incorporated into the next official Mule release, which will help make Mule a better product, make other Mule users happy, and generally make the world a better place.

To people new to open source development, the idea of delving into the source code often sounds daunting, but if you already know what is going wrong, you'll often find that the fix is simply adding an "if (var != null)" check. Now why should you have to speak with 3 levels of support and wait months for that???

And speaking of users, you have a whole community and "ecosystem" of Mule users and integrators to tap into when you get stuck. Chances are, someone in that community has already encountered the same issue as you and can offer some advice. Of course, no one has more knowledge of a piece of software than the team who actually wrote it, which is why the community is not a replacement for the level of professional expertise MuleSource can offer you, but the community does provide orders of magnitude more feedback than any proprietary vendor ever could. And since Mule can be used to integrate just about anything under the sun (not Sun, but yeah, that too :-), if you have a very obscure use case (trying to use Mule to integrate your old DEC mainframe with load-balanced web services using a custom TCP protocol via the serial port, eh?), the user community is going to be your best resource (try getting feedback from a proprietary vendor on that one!)"

Posted by Harper Mann on December 19, 2006 04:04 PM

December 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)

For that special sys-admin on your holiday gift list...

TAGS: Open Source

Nagios is a very popular open-source host, service and network monitoring program that helps streamline network monitoring tasks while reducing the cost of operation. According to the Nagios project site, Nagios is currently in use monitoring more than 900,000 services and 195,000 hosts worldwide.

Taylor Dondich, who is the project lead for Guava - which enhances the presentation layer for Nagios -- recently published a book through O'Reilly titled "Network Monitoring with Nagios. The book serves as a shortcut guide / primer covering installation and usage of Nagios as well as how to extend Nagios with other tools to extend functionality. A quick read at 59 pages, it's a handy guide not only for those who have deployed Nagios in their IT environment, but for those considering using open source for their IT infrastructure monitoring needs.

Network World senior editor Denise Dubie recently did a nice QA with Taylor about his background with Nagios, why he wrote the book, and how open source stacks up with its "commercial brethren."

At $9.99, show a little love to your overworked sys-admin and introduce him to the wonderful world of Nagios.

Posted by Harper Mann on December 19, 2006 09:29 AM

December 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Open Source Monitoring 101- A Refresher

TAGS: Open Source

It's been an exciting year for IT infrastructure monitoring, especially with regards to open source tools. I figured it couldn't hurt to end the year with a quick recap of some of the popular ones that I think deserve recognition. Keep these projects in mind when thinking of IT infrastructure and network monitoring solutions in the coming year.

Data Gathering
The very base level of monitoring. A well-liked data gathering and collection tool is Colletcd, a small daemon that collects system information and writes this information into database files that can be used to generate graphs of the collected data.

Data Storage
RTG is a data storage tool that is designed to allow service providers to rapidly collect large amounts of time-series SNMP data and insert it into a database. syslog-ng provides a secure, platform-independent, centralized log of network devices, and can filter based on message content and customize data mining and analysis.

Data Analysis and Presentation
Some people underestimate the importance of the presentation layer - without the appropriate visibility into network issues, it is easy to miss crucial factors. RRDtool, which I can't say enough about, is a good multi-function tool that is useful for data analysis and provides clear and sophisticated data presentation and reporting options. It has strong graphing capabilities allows users to write custom monitoring shell scripts or even create whole applications.

Data Management
MySQLAdmin is a solid data management and archival tool and can be used to perform a variety of organizational administrative functions, including database creation and server status and configuration checks.

There are also several popular tools that I've mentioned before that span categories - to name a few, Nagios, a popular open source host, service, and network monitoring program and Cacti, a network graphing solution that provides clear and sophisticated graphing capabilities.

The maturity and traction of these tools signify that open source is a viable alternative to proprietary solutions. In 2007, I'd like to see open source monitoring better tackle the issue of scalability, as environments (and the number of devices that need to be monitored) continues to swell in the mid-market.

Posted by Harper Mann on December 18, 2006 05:41 PM

December 08, 2006 | Comments: (0)

MRTG and RRDtool Creator Receives 2006 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award

TAGS: Open Source

I wanted to give kudos to Tobi Oetiker for receiving the 2006 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for the creation of the Open Source Software tools MRTG and RRDtool at the LISA event in Washington DC this week.

MRTG and RRDtool are freely (as in freedom and in free beer) available software tools for the collection and graphical display of time series data and are mainly deployed to monitor computer networks and network traffic. Disclosure - RRDtool is integrated into our GroundWork Monitor Professional IT infrastructure monitoring solution and Tobi sits on the Open Source Council we launched in August at LinuxWorld.

SAGE (the USENIX special interest group for sysadmins) had some nice things to say about the project and the developers.

"Before the creation of these tools, the only people that could reap the benefits of long-term, historical statistics gathering were people with multimillion dollar budgets. MRTG and RRDtool democratized, and therefore popularized, historical data collection. As a result, network utilization planning has gone from being guesswork to a fine art. These tools have also been leveraged to track a wide array of resources ranging from disk I/O stats to CPU and memory usage to license server data.

Thanks to Tobias, Dave, and their team, system and network administrators are no longer limited to fire-fighting when our resources are overloaded. We can now easily access network and system data in an intuitive form to predict and plan for upgrades months in advance."

Check out the tools if you get a chance - great functionality, thriving community.

Posted by Harper Mann on December 8, 2006 10:19 AM