NetworkWorld compared the OSS system management products from Zenoss, Hyperic and Groundwork.

NWW results:
1. Zenoss-4.0
Pros: Excellent discovery of network resources; intuitive user interface.
Cons: Needs a visual design environment for customizing reports.

2. Hyperic-3.6
Pros: Impressive, complex thresholds; good reports.
Cons: Remediation is a very manual process.

3. Groundwork-3.1
Pros: Good, basic network monitoring.
Cons: Lacks dashboards; no ability to track Service Level Agreements.

One potentially interesting factoid is that each of these products has a different technology behind it. Zenoss is Python, Hyperic is Java and I think Groundwork is Perl with a bunch of PHP and Java. FiveRuns (not reviewed) was all written in Ruby so I guess you can solve the same problem in many different ways. (Apologies if I got those programming languages wrong.)

Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 19, 2007 08:58 PM