Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

It’s official! If there is anything I suck at, it’s predicting how long it’ll take to develop software. Granted I’m not alone in this flaw, but it’s not even funny how far off I was.

Almost a year ago, we’ve made some major decisions in the company. One of them was the move to open source. Not only developing our software as open source but also replacing existing components with open source ones wherever possible. As you can imagine, this required major (colossal?) changes to existing software. We found excellent open source solutions for web development, data storage, etc. that were similar to our in-house developed solutions, but we had to invest significant time to migrate to these technologies.  I thought it would take us 3 months, doubled the amount to give some room and thought 6 months would be a realistic estimate. Well let’s just say it took longer but we’re there. Today, we’ve released RapidInsight v3, an open source automation, integration and presentation solution for IT operations management.  Although it took about a year of hard work, I think it was worth the effort. It was not easy to shed what we developed specifically to fit our needs with external more generic solutions, but going forward the payoff is already clear.

I’ve written a (too) long post on iFountain blog about the history of IT Event Management (as I see it), the need for a different approach, what drove us to develop RapidInsight and why I think it’s different (and better) than alternatives currently available, open source or otherwise. But I think there is a significant gap in open source management tools in this area.  RapidInsight does not compete directly with any of the open source IT management tools currently available (that I’m aware of).

There are number of open source management tools such as Nagios, OpenNMS, Zenoss, Hyperic, etc., for monitoring, Puppet, ControlTier, ZipTie for configuration/deployment automation, etc.RapidInsight does not directly compete with any of these tools. I think there is significant potential value in integrating RapidInsight with these tools, using RapidInsight built-in CMDB, to integrate IT management information, and to provide  single interface (both for users and programmatically). Potential uses of RapidInsight is listed over here.

We’ve already started working on integrating RapidInsight with open source monitoring tools. Provided that these communities share our belief that there is value in the integration, we will continue improving the quality of the integration.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Any feedback would be much appreciated. Please feel free to contact me directly or go over to our development site and participate in shaping RapidInsight.

Watch this space for the news on integration with your favorite tools. Better yet, tell us what you’d like to see integrated first!