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As it’s the start of a new year I thought it would be an ideal time to look back over the year just gone. I have used Google Trends to compare the number of searches during 2008 of various open source and proprietary network management tools.

Whilst search volume is an interesting metric for network management tools, it is not intended to be in any way indicative of the usefulness of a particular tool. If you want to choose a tool, start from your own requirements first and select a tool from that.

Open Source Network Management System Trends

First up is a comparison of the major open source network management systems. Nagios, as one of the oldest open source projects in network management, still has a huge community of users and, in spite of a number of very good competitors, appears to be holding its own.

MRTG during 2008 does show signs of continued decline. Hardly surprising given that a number of very capable competitors exist that are much easier to install and configure.

Zenoss, Hyperic and OpenNMS are all doing well, retaining substantial levels of searches with Zenoss retaining its early lead.

A Comparison of the Nagios Ecosystem

Nagios is a significant open source project in and of itself. In addition, it also has an ecosystem of tools built on top of it as well. There are three main nagios core tools: GroundWork Open Source, Centreon and OpsView.

I haven’t been able to use Groundwork Open Source because a comparison wouldn’t be valid given how many words it is made up of. Many people may well type in Groundwork instead of Groundwork Open Source even though you will get a lot of civil engineering related results.

Configuration is one area Nagios is not very user friendly to new users, relying upon editing configuration files for changes. Both Centreon and OpsView provide an improved configuration experience, reducing or completely removing the need to directly edit configuration files. Surprisingly both Centreon and OpsView receive substantially fewer searches than Nagios.

Open vs Closed Network Management Systems

A comparison between a representative sample of both open source and proprietary tools shows an interesting trend.

Both NetIQ and OpenView are losing searches whilst the open tools are holding up well. Perhaps, money was tighter in 2008 due to the economic woes befalling many economies. OpenView has been particularly badly hit, being well down over the year as a whole.

Conclusion

The open source network management tools search volume has held up very well throughout 2008. The same cannot be said for either proprietary tools, OpenView and NetIQ. Both of the proprietary tools have seen their search volume fall. A recession started during 2008 in many countries worldwide. So, that people are searching less for expensive software tools, maybe isn’t that surprising. I doubt the Google Trends data could evidence a shift from proprietary to open source tools though, given the absence of an upshift in searches for open source tools.