Open Management Consortium Blog

Sorry about the lack of OSCON posts

tlockney — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 02:04:43 GMT

It turns out that after Wednesday, the wifi at OCC was pretty much unusable for me, at least. And unfortunately, I didn't get time to post about interesting systems management related sessions until I was actually there. As it happens, Thursday was rather light anyway, though there was a good session on Puppet again this year. I ended up staying home today since there were very few interesting sessions and I was beat.

News feeds now available on openmanagement.org

whurley — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:13:16 GMT

Want to find the latest news on systems management or open source? Look no further than the recently updated openmanagement.com. You'll find live rss news feeds (updated as news becomes available) on the right hand side of the website. I'm currently working on a way to add "topic areas" for all of the things you love so dearly. Once this happens, I'll add a relevant news feed for each. If you have suggestions, comments, or questions, please add a comment to this post so we can have the discussion out in the open.

Cleaning up openmanagement.org

whurley — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:09:47 GMT

There were a few bugs that had crept into the site over the past few iterations. For example, some of you reported seeing a scrollbar at the bottom of your browser that didn't actually go away; ever. Well, today I spent a few moments going through all of the reported bugs and squashing them. So far I'm fairly certain that everything reported has been fixed. That doesn't men there isn't more work to be done. So, if you're using the website, and you're experiencing issues please report them in a comment to this post. I will keep a close eye on it over the next few weeks and will fix any issues as quickly as possible.

I'll also be adding a few new features. As these become available I'll make sure to announce them so that everyone can check them out (and help test them out). In the meantime, if there's something you'd like to see on the site that would make it more useful please comment and let me know so that tlockney and I can see what we can do to improve the features for you.

Spam comments in 'Trackbacks'

whurley — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:57:00 GMT

As many of you might have notice, there was recently an outbreak of spam related trackbacks across the site. tlockney and I have removed them all and temporarily disabled trackbacks until we can find an alternative solution. If for any reason this causes an issue with your blog, please direct message on of us (whurley or tlockney) and we'll be happy to help fix things.

Enomalism 2.0 Available for Download, Seeking Beta Testers

whurley — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:08:57 GMT

Hey Everyone,

Reuven has just let me know that the latest release of Enomalism (2.0) is now available for download. They are also seeking beta testers. Here are the details from his email:

Enomaly, Inc. is pleased to announce the Alpha release of the Enomalism Elastic Computing Platform. The Enomalism v2.0 Alpha has been completely redeveloped from the ground up and further builds on the concept of " Elastic / Cloud Computing".

Over the coming weeks there will be ongoing developments as we continue to improve the application. We hope to move to a stable "BETA" within a couple weeks. The current release is considered "Alpha" and should be used at your own risk.

New Enomalism Features include:

Web Services API - RESTful

Automated VM Deployment with Elastic Valet

Multi-Server Support

Virtual Cluster Engine

Extensible system monitoring integration

Flexible business process management with SOA (jBPM)

Integrated appliance / module repository

Extended User / Group Management

Elastic Dashboard / Portal Framework

System Metering (Utility / Chargeback)

Increased Virtual Machine / Hypervisor Support

Xen, KVM, Qemu, OpenVZ, Amazon EC2 * (Ec2 Module)

Support for installation in Linux & Windows

New Open Source License (AGPL)

For installation Documentation and core distribution download, please visit

http://trac.enomalism.com/enomalism/

BETA TESTERS

We are currently seeking BETA testers to assist with the following tasks:

Interface Debugging CSS, JS (IE7,Firefox)

Platform Testing (Linux,Windows,BSD,OSX)

Cluster Testing

Amazon EC2 Testing

Repository / Appliance Testing

Module Testing

User Management Testing

REST API Testing

Anything else that needs fixing.

If you are interested in lending a hand, please visit the Enomalism forums at

http://www.enomalism.com/resources/community-center/

RHQ - Red Hat and Hyperic Launch a New Monitoring Project

mrhinkle — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 21:32:57 GMT

Congratulations to Red Hat and Hyperic for Launching the RHQ project . Here's the overview:

+RHQ, the common services project for infrastructure management.

It is being collaboratively developed by Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Hyperic,

the leader in web infrastructure management software. The new project

will provide a common set of management services, which will be

incorporated into future editions of Red Hat products such as JBoss Operations Network and Red Hat Network, as well as Hyperic HQ.+

Another Win For Open Source Systems Management

mrhinkle — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:59:18 GMT

Congratulations to the Hyperic crew for landing CNET as a client. (http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9865828-16.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheOpe nRoad)

Hyperic Inc., a leading open source web infrastructure management software provider, today announced that CNET Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNET), a leading interactive media company, will standardize its systems and application management on Hyperic HQ Enterprise across all its web properties. When the CNET implementation is complete, Hyperic will be deployed across thousands of live Linux servers throughout CNET's data centers.

Nice to see open source management for open source systems:

Hyperic will replace CNET's homegrown management platform which was based on several other open source technologies. Hyperic gives CNET more functionality than its previous solution, including scalability, usability, and virtualization management capabilities that help the company to stay on top of its highly customized web application infrastructure that includes large deployments of Linux, MySQL, Apache, and Resin Application Servers.

Your help needed: Who is the best candidate for the open source community?

whurley — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:57:20 GMT

Hey Everyone,

I have a question for you the group:

<h5>Have any of the 2008 candidates ever even heard the words 'open' and 'source' used together in a sentence?</h5>

My guess is probably not, which is sad. Think about the current issues around patent reform. Does open source play a role? If so, shouldn't the candidates have some basic knowledge of open source?

It's with that in mind that I put together a little survey on my blog. Now this isn't a scheme to drive traffic. I really want to know what people think. So, I'm writing you to provide you with both the link to the poll, as well as the code to embed the poll on your own site if you'd like:

http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-whurley/whurley/who-is-best-for-open-source-in-20 08

<b><i>Again, the goal here is to get as many people's opinion as possible</b></i>. Please feel free to not only add the poll to your site but to help get other key influential bloggers in the open source world to do the same (your list is probably better than mine). In fact, <b>write your own blog about this</b> (you don't even have to reference mine). As long as we all use the same poll we can easily share the results (and not fragment things) with everyone. In a perfect world I'd love to see 100k+ people share their opinion over the next week. That will take each of us working together to get this poll on as many websites as possible.

I'd also welcome any comments (pro or con about this) either via email, or preferably on <a href="http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-whurley/whurley/who-is-best-for-open-source-in-20 08">my blog and out in the open where everyone can participate in the discussion</a>.

Let me know what you think,

whurley

NetworkWorld: Open source management continues to thrive

mrhinkle — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:06:46 GMT

There was an article in NetWorkWorld today titled,"[Open Source Management Continues to Thrive|http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/nsm/2008/0204nsm1.html]." It mentions Zenoss and Hyperic both OMC members.

Introducing the OMC Open Agent Project

whurley — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:06:04 GMT

Today at <a href="barcampesm.org">BarCampESM</a> Erik Dahl led as discussion on "The need for an open agent". After this discussion tlockney and I announced the GA of the new Open Management Consortium website, and via a "show of hands" consensus, set up a new sub=project in the monitoring community for the "OMC Open Agent" project. Erik will be leading the effort and building out the community over the next weeks. Please join in and help him out. Now, go visit the new <a href="http://openmanagement.org/community/monitoring/omc_open_agent">OMC Open Agent community</a> to learn more about this exciting project.

BarCamp ESM Kick-Off

mrhinkle — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 17:51:41 GMT

If you want to get the play by play from BarCamp today follow our Twitter feed at : http://twitter.com/barcampESM

BarCampESM kicked off with a roll call of the attendees. More will be coming throughout the day. These guys get credit for getting here early.

Instigators

whurley - Chief Open Source Architect OpenNMS
John M. Willis - Tivoli expert, ESM Fanatic
Mark R. Hinkle - Zenoss, VP of Commmunity, open source groover

The Attendees

Tarus Balog - Founder of the OpenNMS project
David Winter - Manager Services Manages - Coleman Technologies
Alex Horner - Control Tier Software
Bill Karpovich - Founder and CEO of Zenoss
Eric Dahl - Founder CTO of Zenoss
Heath Newburn - Worldwide product manager Tivoli Monitoring
Kartick Suriamoorthy- Community Manager Ziptie, for Alterpoint
Michael Nels - Alterpoint
Michale Cote - Analyst, RedMonk, former BMC developer
Doug McClure - IBM Tivoli
John Mick
Damon Edwards - Control Tier
NTS Solutions
Lee Thomas - eTrade Financial
Steve Carl - Manager of R&D Support, BMC Software

Open Management Consortium Breaks 1000 Members on LinkedIN

whurley — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:25:37 GMT

I guess this should have been posted earlier but I wanted to let you know that the Open Management Consortium Officially broke the 1000 Members mark on LinkedIN. This is exciting news, and as soon as the site goes through a little more testing tlockney and I will announce GA to that list and hopefully grow the number of conversations/participation by several orders of magnitude. While we're holding off a little on this, you should feel free to start spreading the word about this new website to people you know in the industry. So go forth and spread the word of the OMC's new website and help us make this the largest most active voice in open source systems management.

Where's the OMC on LinkedIN?

whurley — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:15:49 GMT

Hey Everyone,

A couple of people asked me what would be happening to the OMC on LinkedIN now that we have the new web infrastructure in place. Well, I see no reason to stop using the LinkedIN group at this point. So, we'll do everything here and if someone wants to join on LinkedIN then the join link will still be available. What's that link you ask? Excellent question:

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/2177/7B49AA043016

Introducing design patterns for systems management

whurley — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:20:44 GMT

Moments ago ahonor opened a discussion entitled Design patterns for software operations? which caught our eye. Here's specifically what cuaght my eye:

Those of you that develop software (or have in their past) are probably used to the idea of using or referring to design patterns when implementing software. One of the things great about design patterns is that they explain the problem space, analyze it and describe generic solutions that can be implemented in your application language and/or runtime of choice (ie, they are technology agnostic). It especially helps avoid re-inventing solutions.

Working in various software operations groups over the years it eventually seemed obvious to me that there were nascent design patterns that could be applied generally and be a source of useful knowledge. You can read more about my reasoning at the dev2ops blog: http://dev2ops.blogspot.com/2008/01/where-are-design-patterns-for-software.html

In addition to linking to his original blog post ahonor suggested that we start a workgroup within the OMC:

To get the idea off the ground, I would like to propose using the wiki and forums facilities of the Open Management Consortium website. We could fit the discussion under an existing group like "Open Standards" or create a new community group like "Design Patterns". The wiki plays the role of catalog and repository while the forums can be useful for hammering out ideas.

The process of starting a repository of patterns should initially be informal to encourage participation. As time goes on and as the number of proposals increases, we can determine a means to catalog and measure consensus.

I am volunteering to get things started and drive the effort. I think we would all benefit from having a resource like this and it can only help improve consistency and even interoperability!

Well, as you all know this is exactly how we want the OMC to operate; community lead. So we have created a new workspace under the "Open Standards" section of the website called "OMC Design Patterns". Thanks to ahonor for the idea and for volunteering to kick things off and help manage the workspace. You can link directly to the workspace (from your blog or other sites) using the following URL:

http://beta.openmanagement.org/community/open_standards/omc_design_patterns

It will be very interesting to see how much adoption this idea picks up. I for one will be participating heavily in the workspace as ahonor has a great idea/perspective that I hope others join in support of.

BarCampESM: It’s time for the systems management community to start acting like one.

whurley — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 19:07:28 GMT

It’s time for the systems management community to start acting like one. whurley (BMC Software), Mark Hinkle (Zenoss), and John Willis (Zabovo) are taking the lead, with the help of several open source projects, bloggers, analyst, and even competitors. We’re sponsoring the world’s first Enterprise System’s Management BarCamp. Like BarCamp, DevCamp, and SuperHappyDevHouse, BarCampESM will throw users, developers, vendors, and anyone else interested in systems management together at a non-commercial event, organized by volunteers, with free attendance for all. You can learn more and sign up here:

http://barcampesm.org

We'll be announcing the venue in the next 48 hours, and for those of you flying in it will probably be downtown. Austin's small though and trust us, you want to stay downtown if you can