Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

As it is in many market segments, companies in IT management industry are looking for an open source business model that works.  The prevailing approach seems to be the hybrid model. In this model, the companies offer both open source and proprietary versions of their products and proprietary versions typically provide additional high end features that is not available in the open source versions of their products.

This business model is only available to the companies that have the IP ownership of the open source code and not an option for more traditional open source projects where IP rights are distributed among many people and there is no single holder.

The model is a win win for both the vendors and the customers provided that the open source versions of the products are viable solutions that stand on their own and not just a ramp that requires every user to upgrade to the paid versions. Customers get access to open source software that solves their problems and vendors get well established benefits of having an open source community.

Not everyone agrees with the above statement.  There is a discussion that started with cote naming the open source IT management companies “little 4″ as contrast to the proprietary “big 4″ (IBM,CA,HP,BMC), and heated up again with QClusters exit from the openQRM project, hence little 4 becoming “Little 3″ .

openQRM was not really in the same category with the other 3 in little 4 anyway, and its exit provided an opportunity to reevaluate the open source IT management companies. John Willis took a more minimalist approach, coming up with his own name, calling Hyperic and Zenoss the “mighty two“, others suggested Groundwork and OpenNMS should round up the new Little 4.

John states that Hyperic and Zenoss has a better chance to succeed in the enterprise as they are software companies with significant funding and solid infrastructure. Not surprisingly opposing view comes primarily from the OpenNMS camp (read the comments in John’s post).  Tarus is not a fan of the hybrid model. He has criticized the hybrid model (and hence Hyperic and Zenoss), claiming it to be flawed, several times in his posts and comments. He advocates the OpenNMS group’s professional services only model as the superior (and even the only viable) model and states the success of the OpenNMS project as the evidence.

The hybrid model is not an option for OpenNMS group as (unlike hyperic/zenoss) they don’t own the IP rights for the code.  OpenNMS apparently has an active developer community that contributes code (surprisingly rare as more and more open source code is developed by few individuals or companies) and OpenNMS group has one or two people who may be dedicated to development rather than services.  OpenNMS folks seem to be content with their position, but I wonder why they don’t aspire for more.

Despite being compared to Hyperic and Zenoss, OpenNMS is different product. IMHO, it is the only true (open source) “network monitoring” product available. Hyperic/Zenoss/Nagios are primarily for server monitoring with some capabilities to monitor network devices, yet still not an option for serious network monitoring.  The paste of opennms development is slow which is understandable given the fact that there is no dedicated development team. Let’s imagine for a second that OpenNMS group also used the hybrid model and external funding to staff developers to work on opennms. Could they have developed a discovery engine that auto discovers the network layers (layer 2, 3, routing, etc.)? Visual maps to represent these layers? What is OpenNMS offered this additional functionality only in the paid version but all the functionality available now was still available. What if on top of what is currently available, foss version of opennms had gotten a package that can be installed and run on windows easily 3-4 years ago? Would having the option to pay for this additional functionality be a bad thing for the community? Would removing entry barriers such as extensive documentation and easy installation packages not help increase opennms user base?

Open source companies need to continue to innovate in the business model level to find ways to fund the projects that work both for the companies and the communities. Hybrid model is what has emerged so far as one viable option. It is not perfect but it offers an alternative that is in many ways better than pure professional services model. There does not have to be “one true way”.  The alternative may be getting squeezed out of the market. Tarus likes to compare OpenNMS with HP and the likes, suggesting that OpenNMS is a viable alternative to them. It is. but it is playing the catch up game instead of leading the field. The tougher competition for opennms (and other open source projects) is not coming from the large proprietary companies like HP and IBM, but from small, agile companies like solarwinds and adventnet with nicely packaged, easy to use products with often lower prices than the open source companies.

If open source companies cannot innovate both business model and technologically, they may get squeezed by these companies in the lower end of the market and the larger proprietary companies with massive sales forces in the higher end of the market.

In the network monitoring is a commodity myth, I argued that network monitoring is far from being a commodity and on the contrary needs innovation to cope with the increasing complexity.

As cote mentioned in the comments of that post, there has been some fresh blood in the IT management industry. Several open source companies/projects are tackling the monitoring problem, which is a good thing, yet I feel we’re still missing some pieces. AFAIK, most of the monitoring solutions seem to be following existing paradigms :

• monitoring the devices (nodes) through SNMP agent
• synthetic transcations to determine the status of services running on nodes

The understanding of the network topology is missing in both paradigms. In other words, nodes are what’s being monitored. Not the network. The network topology (except layer 3) is largely unknown. This limits the effectiveness of the monitoring. Monitoring tools (or rather functionality offered by the tools) can be categorized broadly as the following:

• Polling the devices: Most common approach in IP networks. Most IP networking devices have an SNMP agent that supports at least MIBII so basic availability and performance information can be obtained. For more detailed information however, use proprietary MIBs is needed. Many IT management guys spent long hours trying to understand these MIBs, which data is where, compile them to be used by their monitoring tools, etc.
• Listening for exceptions: Not every network device has an available agent that can be polled, especially in lower layers below IP. And when available, ability to listen for information is useful as it can be more immediate. In IP networks, these are typically SNMP traps or syslog events. In others, there are often element managers that convey messages. Again, IT management folks spent countless, often frustrating hours, trying to make sense of the traps, syslog events, etc. normalizing them, translate them into human language, identifying what is important and what’s not etc.
• Listening to the pipes: It is possible to learn a lot by listening to what goes on the network. Flow tools (Netflow and its kin cFlow, J-Flow, netstream, sflow, etc.) generate end to end traffic statistics based on flow of data through the network device that support it. Another approach seems to be analyzing the traffic going through a device using a span port. Although it seems this method is popular to analyze application traffic. I don’t have a lot of personal experience with these tools so I’ll leave it to others to explain it better or correct me. From what I see these tools often require hardware distributed throughout the network to get full visibility which may be a hurdle for adoption.

IMHO, all of the approaches I’ve tried to summarize above have some shortcomings. As far as I can see, the situation may improve in two ways:

• someone may come up with a new technology, a clever way to monitor the network and identifytthe problems, may be discover & represent the network etc. IMO, this can only happen if some of the investment and attention in tools that target “business users” with sexy, shiny UIs flow back to the muck. When the payoff is so low (who wants to tackle a “commodity” problem?) significant investment is not likely.
• The power of the community is harvested to solve tedious problems once and share rather than each user struggling to solve the same problems over and over independently. There are already some examples of this splunk is attempting to create a repository of log events and what they mean. ZipTie open source project is working on solving device configuration through collaboration of vendors and customers (how come they are not a member?)

There is a lot more that can be done in the monitoring realm, if we can manage to setup the right collaboration platform (commercially, legally as well as technically) to facilitate sharing, which is sorely lacking in IT management for whatever the reasons may be.

From what I can see, ZipTie model is particularly interesting and suitable. Ability to collaborate and share is potentially a major competitive advantage for open source projects. I believe there are opportunities here for collaboration among open source projects/companies and their users/customers.

For example, in the case of discovery and representation of the network topology, how to get the topology data out of vast number of different type of devices is can be shared. If a common model can be defined to represent the topology, adapters to populate the model for each device can be developed.

In case of trap and event log processing, the knowhow of what each trap may mean, what the varbinds are can be shared. And again if a commong model can be defined to represent the traps/events, adapters to convert the traps into the common model can be developed.

I think these activities are naturally conducive to be solved through collaboration, and the life in the trenches would improve significantly if we were tackling them together instead of drowning in them alone.

There is a persistent meme in the industry that states (network) monitoring is now a commodity. This meme is so persistent that it seems it’s no longer even disputed. There are lots of different monitoring tools, many of them are open source and/or free, and they’ve been around for a long time, hence the thinking goes, monitoring is now a commodity.

It is quite puzzling to me how terribly wrong this meme is. How can we be so wrong? IMHO, network monitoring is not a commodity. Far from it. Network monitoring is still largely an unsolved problem. The tools we have to monitor the “network” are largely inadequate.

Network is a complex beast, and level of complexity is increasing by leaps and bounds as well as the criticality of it.. It has layers over layers and only limited set of people understand it all. Our monitoring of the network is mostly limited to what we understand the most: the nodes in the network. We don’t really monitor the network itself which is a complex distributed application running on these nodes.

This reminds me a famous Nasreddin Hodja folk tail where he looses his ring in the basement of his house but people find him looking for it outside, on the road. When asked why he is looking for it outside, he says that the basement is too dark, and he can’t see anything there.

It seems to me that somewhat like Hodja, we’re monitoring the nodes in the network since we can, and not monitoring the network because, well, we can’t. The problem is largely related to instrumentation. More or less standard instrumentation SNMB MIBII, etc.) to monitor the status of a device and its ports & interfaces has been available for quite some time but very little instrumentation is available to determine the network topology, and whatever is available is not standard.

Without the understanding the network topology and the role of the nodes in that topology, the value of monitoring of the nodes is quite limited. We end up collecting a lot of information that does not necessarily helps us determine what’s wrong. This is also largely the cause of the disconnect between the users and IT organizations when talking about availability reporting. IT reports on availability of the nodes in the network which does not necessarily equate to the availability of the services that run on the network.

As an alternative when the services are monitored directly, we may be able to determine whether the service is up or down, but cannot determine what the cause of problem may be by looking at the monitoring tools.

The focus in IT management market has moved up to stack so to speak to “business level” where tools which shiny user interfaces that provide “executive dashboards” are all the rage. IT departments have hell of a time justfying an investment in better monitoring tools but have easier time investing in tools that address the higher level. Ironically, the higher level tools rely on the information provided by the lower level tools such as the monitoring tools hence without solving the monitoring problem, it’s not feasible to have meaningful dashboards.

Beating up the IT organizations has become such a popular sport that no one seems to listen to what they have to say. As a result, IT management discussions increasingly risk loosing touch with reality. I confess to be jealous of cote’s blog biline “one foot in the muck, the other in the utopia” as I believe is the right philosopy to solve any problem worth solving. Network monitoring is in desparate need of innovation and attention, but that is not likely to happen if we start paying more attention to what the people in the muck are saying and kill this false meme of monitoring is a commodity

I don’t have the answer to how to solve this problem, but I think the community may well have. In the next post, I’ll lay out not what I think may be an answer but what I hope may trigger some thoughts on what can be done to tackle the problem of “network” monitoring.

John Willis asks whether ITIL still matters in the world of Amazon and Google (what I once referred as “best in class infrastructure providers“). ITIL skepticism is not new; there has been skeptics since the beginning for variety of reasons; some more valid than others. John is raising the issue from a different perspective. He stipulates that ITIL may not be required if majority of the services are provided by external giant service providers like a utility.

From my perspective, the availability of these services from the likes of Google/Amazon make ITIL and ITSM more relevant and necessary in the enterprise, not less. One of the core ideas of ITIL/ITSM is to have a service perspective and managing the dependencies of the services to the infrastructure used to provide these services. The fact that some of the infrastructure components are provided by external providers who supposedly have great availability numbers does not change the fact that enterprises still have to manage the “service”.
As I stated in a previous post the question we should be asking is how we can you end to end management of a service when the infrastructure for the service relies on combination of multiple internal and external service providers.

ITIL/ITSM offers some guidelines on how to cope this complex world. How should the enterprises troubleshoot problems? What should the service desk processes be like? Business/end users have never cared much about the availability of the servers, they care about the service. The services as perceived by the users are rarely provided in their entirety by a single provider. Most of the mission critical services have multiple components provided by different internal and external entities. What should be the operational processes to manage these services?
A typical scenario that exposes the cleavage between different silos in the enterprise is the “blame the network syndrome” where users complain about the performance of an application, and every group (silo) blames another and the network group gets stuck with proving their innocence. How do you “convince” all parties involved -the connectivity providers (LAN/WAN/Security, etc), application providers, platform (server) providers (internal or external) - to cooperate in order to resolve problems quickly? This has always been difficult, and rise of giant service providers don’t alleviate the pain. Processes are still needed, guidelines are still needed, learning from the experiences of other still needed.
This is not to deny the significance of the change in the field . No doubt the game is changing as stated by John, but the implications of these changes are not so apparent. The rise of service providers that promise 99.99% availability may mean enterprises will more and more use the services provided by these external providers, instead of keeping them internal. If that’s the case, enterprises will need to learn how to manage services that are not under their direct control. It may also mean that if they do keep them internal for whatever reason, management of these services can no longer be an afterthought as it often has been.
The game is changing and we must figure out how to adapt. Unfortunately, enterprise (IT management) users are not out on the web sharing their thoughts with each other in mass. As the web 2.0 culture infiltrates the enterprise, who knows may be the enterprise folks come out to play and we can come up with an ITIL that is developed like an open source application, out in the open with participation of hundreds. Who knows, may be OMG will be the catalyzer for wider discussions, once can only hope …

Last week, Google came up with a new version of their web based RSS Reader, Google Reader. Contrary to the original release, this one got very positive reviews. I had also tried the initial version of the Google Reader and gave up after a while. It was just awkward. It did not work for me at all, and I could not even speculate what they were trying to do.

I then tried Netvibes and the experience has been quite the opposite, so I have been using Netvibes as my RSS reader and have been quite happy with it.

When the new version of the Google Reader came up, I was not eager to try, then I saw other posts and comments and am interested in the “river of news ” approach, so I’ve decided to try it again. This time around, experience was much better. I did like the river of news pattern, so I’ve exported my opml from Netvibes and imported into Google Reader, and I was good to go.

I’ve been using Google Reader as my RSS Reader for the last week, and my initial positive impression gradually has been replaced with frustration as I continue to use it due to usability issues, and bad design. Google Reader UI gets in the way, and is missing some basic functionality.

• Caching of the posts

I find myself waiting for the UI to get data, and this is quite annoying, and waste of time. Everytime I click to a feed, it seems to get the post for that feed on demand, and this is just not right, if you use RSS reader regularly. This is complete opposite of the Gmail experience, what were they thinking?

Netvibes on the other hand, has the posts cached in the browser, when I click something, response is immediate. I had not realized how great this was, till I got frustrated by Google Reader.

• Auto refresh

Google reader does not refresh the feeds, at least by default. I have to go click refresh every time? In their video , Google engineer uses the analogy to email and says that the Google Reader is the inbox for the web. I don’t have to click get mail when I need to read email, why do I have to do that with RSS ?

Again, Netvibes shines. I can see how many new posts there are total, at each tab, and for each feed. Works for me.

• No way to mark a post read

When there are a lot of new posts, I often scan the title of the posts (similar to reading the subject of an email) and decide whether or not I need to read the post. In Google Reader, I could not find a way to mark it read without opening it, and when I open a post it takes over the screen, I had to click the title again to close it. Very time consuming.

I did find out later that I can use the keyboard and push some letters to go down the list and mark a post read without opening it. Great, thanks for nothing! I can feel the developer who thinks vi is the greatest editor behind the design decisions. This is what happens when engineers develop something for their own use. Newsflash, people out there do not necessarily want to learn a set of key combinations to use a web site. In fact, the web is what it is because you can use it once you understand point and click, all sites work the same. You want to have keyboard control as well, great, have that, there are many people (read techies) who like that, but don’t make it the only way to do something.

Again, this is no issue with Netvibes, I can mark a feed or tab read with a mouse click.

So I gave up on using Google Reader once again, despite my liking to the layout. A lot of people liked the fact that it is like gmail. I guess I don’t like the fact that it is not like gmail enough. None of what I’ve listed above is hard to fix. Considering how much it improved compared to the previous release, I have every reason to hope that these issues will be resolved.

Will I give it another chance in the future, likely. In the mean time, Netvibes is getting better continuously and meeting my needs, so I’ll stick with them.

Google - Yahoo competition is heating up. The main battle field seems to be the search and how to get advertisers. Google seems ahead with ever increasing revenues where Yahoo is struggling.

The NYTimes article states clearly that Yahoo has a greater audience using larger set of web services (although weak in search).

I am a Yahoo! customer. I personally use Yahoo premium services Mail, etc., and our company is using web/email hosting services provided by Yahoo. These services have been around for a while, and we’re reasonably happy with them. The thing is Yahoo has not add anything in this area for years!

One would think that as it provides differentiation (less dependency in ad revenue) premium services and services for small and midsize businesses would be an attractive business for Yahoo. May be due to the billions flowing into the Google’s pockets, Yahoo seemed to be locked into competing for ad dollars, neglecting other areas in the mean time.

As an example, we would love to use Yahoo groups in our company both internally and faciliate communications with customers, partners, etc. We cannot use it in its ad supported form for our business, but we’d pay a descent amount to use Yahoo groups as part of our website (which is already hosted by Yahoo). The same goes for calendar, etc.
Why is this service not available? I doubt it’s technical reasons.

On the path to becoming a “media company” has Yahoo lost interest to services side of their business?  Does Yahoo not make enough money from hosting, premium type services to make it attractive?

Does Yahoo need Google to get into the game to improve ? It seems like it took competition from Google to move Yahoo in various areas. Yahoo improved maps after Google made Yahoo maps primitive. One can easily argue that currently Yahoo maps are better than Google’s. Same story is repeated with Finance portal. Yahoo finance had not been improved for years until Google released their slick Finance site. With egg on their face, Yahoo followed suite quickly.

I hope that it does not take for Google to provide the same services for Yahoo to realize they are missing an opportunity. After all Google also has the components that we need: Groups, Calendar (excellent), mail, etc.

It’s time for Yahoo to take a look at how they can make better use of their assets!

We communicate regularly with our family members distributed all over the world from China, Turkey, US, etc. Skype video has been great for our family to stay in touch. My parents first saw my 1 week old daughter via Skype Video.

Skype has been our primary communications tool in our
little company (<10 people in three continents) for over a year now.
It’s been a key business enabler for us. I use SkypeIn, SkypeOut as well, and bought couple of Skype certified
devices, so I consider myself a run of the mill Skype customer.

But Skype has been evolving away from our needs and as time goes by problems increase rather than decrease.

I’ve seen an article in Skype journal about Skype identity crisis. It resonated with me.
Skype as an instant messaging/presence tool stayed primitive; little to no improvements. I cannot understand why on earth my status cannot be automaticaly set to “busy” or “on the phone” when I’m talking to someone. It is still not possible to show different status to different groups of people (family/colleagues/customers, etc) and this is essential, almost trivial feature for IM products.

Things also get worse. Today I’ve tried to access the chat history with a colleague and computer froze for a minute before doing anything and after that it took couple more minutes to bring up the history since it show all the history since beginning of dawn with that person.

We also had the supernode problem where one of computers have become a supernode and the router could not handle the number of connections, kept dropping the internet connection till we figured out that it was Skype causing high number of connections.

Things add up. I’m no longer sure that we will continue to use Skype as our primary communications tool. Sure I’ll probably continue to use Skype, but it will not be on all the time, and in time I may drop it completely. My colleagues are quite happy with Gtalk (we often switch to it when Skype quality is poor), and it looks like Yahoo/MS have made significant improvements. One of these tools can easily fill the shoes if Skype keeps screwing up and giving us a reason to try them.

It is official. My favorite “web2.0” company Writely got acquired by Google, ending what I’d imagine was an interesting dance between the interested parties and Writely folks Congragulations is in order for both the folks in Writely and Google. Congragulations to Writely (to be more precise, Upstartle) for developing such a great platform/product and congragulations to Google for their ability to recognize the potential of this platform and the talent of the people who developed it.

Not surprisingly, the usual characters took notice and posted about the acquisition in their blogs. Some quite positive , and some negative (or even clueless ), yet most of the bloggers does not seem to understand what Writely is all about, or at least the posts do not highlight the right aspects of it (There are exceptions of course). Majority of the posts approach Writely as the web based version of Microsoft Word. Obviously Writely is a word processor and so it Microsoft Word, but I believe differences outweight the similarities. Nicolas Carr attempts to live up to the expectations as the most snarky blogger by stating that he’s going to be “hanging on” to his copy of Word for a while. The bloggers with positive outlook on Writely also see Writely as a replacement for Word in the larger scheme of MS Office vs Web Office, longing for the anticipated battle ahead between Google and Microsoft.

Yet Google’s strategy wisely has not been taking on Microsoft head on so far, and this philosopy is shared by the Writely folks. Writely does not attempt to completely replace Word. Writely folks do not just attempt to replicate the feature set of Word over the web, but innovate by taking advantage of the web. They clearly state how they see their product on their website : “The beginning of a whole new way of managing documents, projects and websites online”.

Writely does not and cannot do may things Word can do easily, but also provides great functionality that goes well beyond anything that is provided by Word. I think it would be gross neglect not to emphasize the “collaborative” aspects of Writely. For me Writely solves a real problem of collaboratively working on a document. Anyone who has worked on documents that required participation of multiple parties can relate to the headaches: emailing new versions of a multiple megabytes of document to all participants (can the recipient receive a large attachment?), keeping track of the versions (am I modifying the latest version?), ensuring everbody can actually “read” your document (do they all have Word?), and others.

From this perspective Writely is priceless, and it solves a real business problem. We can now work on the same document even at the same time, be automatically alerted when a document is modified, can see who made what modification, older versions, etc. and don’t have to learn how to use weird tags). Productivity gains are tangible, life is easier with Writely. And Writely does not attempt to “lock” your document in. You can save your document as Word or OpenOffice document or publish directly as PDF file. I use both Mozilla Thunderbird and Gmail and this will likely be the case for some time to come. I suspect that the same will be true for Writely and OpenOffice. If fact I believe one area Writely can benefit is tighter integration with an offline word processor like OpenOffice. That may be the theme for another post..

Upstartle/Writely is the poster child of the new breed of companies:

• Small: Only handful of talented people
• Minimal funding requirements: No need for tens of millions of dollars of funding from VCs. Early funding via the founders/angels, and get acquired by a large player or go public.
• Fast: The site was built in under a year (6 months!) and already operational/useful.
• Open/transparent: Both from technical and social perspective, takes advantage of web technologies, has open communications with early users, integrates with other sites/products, etc.

This validates the notion that the small companies/teams are the best setup to innovate and build new technologies and the large players (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) are the best places to bring the technology to the masses. Writely has “hatched” as a small company and now Google can bring their muscle and reach into the table to provide the technology the the masses. This will be interesting …

PS: This post has been written in Writely and posted directly to my blog from Writely.

Continuing the story of two groups of entreprenuers who are starting up a software company in Turkey and US. In the previous post, The American entrepreneurs have completed their legal requirements and have started developing their product, yet their Turkish counterparts are still struggling and face with the unexpected regulations and associated cost at every step of the way. Will they finally be able to actually start developing their product anytime soon?

The Turkish entrepreneurs now have a certified accountant to help them with the accounting. However, just when they thought that they were free to focus on software development, their accountant informs them that since they are working for themselves, they have to become member of a semi-governmental association that provides benefits (health care, etc.). Apparently, for self-employed people and this is mandatory! They are “touched” by the thoughtfullness of their government in ensuring that they have benefits. The fact that they have not made any money and will not make any for the next year or so is a minor detail. If they knew, their American counter parts would be saddened that unlike Turkish government, their government does not care enough about them to force them to pay benefits to secure their future! How inconsiderate of them.

Read more »