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The Mighty Two (Part One)
By John | February 4, 2008
About a year ago, Coté started a discussion regarding the “Big Four vs. Little Four.” A few months later, Gartner picked up on this idea and created a $495 white paper on the same subject. Coté’s free blog put a stake in the ground highlighting a new market segment in ESM. Fast forward a year later, and the field has normalized, and IMO, we are left with two solid players. Two of the little guys, Hyperic and Zenoss, are no longer that little, and the battle grounds look more like “The Mighty Two vs. The Big Four.” In this first part, I am going to discuss some of the advancements that Hyperic has made over the last year.
Hyperic
Back in October 2007, I did a podcast with Javier Soltero, the CEO of Hyperic, and I made the mistake of calling Hyperic one of the Little Fours. Javier told me in no uncertain terms that nothing little was going on at Hyperic. I immediately had flashbacks of starting my own software company years ago. I realized how frustrating it must sound to someone who has gone through the pains of starting his own company. Since then, I have tried to remove the “Little Four” phrase from my lexicon. Hyperic has made a lot of progress in the last year, and, IMO, it has set itself apart from the aforementioned little group.
Hyperic recently announced its latest release of HQ (HQ 3.2). Hyperic has really distinguished itself as a true player in the ESM space. I was given my first press briefing on the product by Javier, and I found some interesting additions in this release. I have not had a chance to use the current release yet, so these observations are based on the briefing only.
- Infrastructure scalability was a huge goal in this release. In the HQ 3.2 release, Javier told me that it can now process 1.5 million metrics per minute and 10k agents. I have never been a big fan of benchmarking metrics per minutes in monitoring because mileage can vary with metrics, but running cool at 10k agents per one HQ server is a number that holds up with some of the enterprise vendors (i.e., the aforementioned Big Four). The bottom line is that there are only so many ways to get metrics from servers, and all the vendors know where the bodies are buried. Therefore, the real value a vendor adds is creating an ethos with their customers. A large part of the ethos is based on trust. Customers will usually go with a company like IBM or HP for these kinds of solutions because they can feel comfortable that as they grow their vendor can support them. They also like to feel that their current solution is not ephemeral. Hyperic’s HQ 3.2 is making that leap with its infrastructure, scalability, and reliability improvements. In a business where monitoring might be considered a commodity, infrastructure can be a huge differentiator.
- A second area of the HQ 3.2 release that impressed me was visualization scalability. As pretty as all those screens look, guess what, sports fans, they too are a commodity. Even dummies like me can write nice looking dashboards with all the cool open source tools that are available. Having a solid framework for defining one’s data is more important than how one presents it. Products like Tivoli have learned over time that it is important to create meta definitions for your data to remove dependencies on specific interfaces. Separating data from the tool is nothing new, but I am always amazed how many “Monitoring” products fail to do this. Once you metarize your data, it allows your product endless possibilities of use. For example, in Tivoli you the historical interface, the SOAP API, and the real-time presentation all use a single meta definition. Hyperic has reckognized this and has added this type of functinaility into the Hq 3.2 framework in the form of UI plugins.
- A third area that is an important improvement for Hyperic’s HQ 3.2 is the “You can’t live with ‘em and you can’t live without ‘em” feature. Nagios is pervasive, and all vendors are going to have to deal with it (“Big Four” included). If you ignore Nagios, you are missing an enormous opportunity. Therefore, a smart play is the Trojan horse. A lot of customers have Nagios somewhere in their enterprise. Embracing and encapsulating Nagios is a great idea and allows a vendor to coexist with and add improvements to Nagios. This coexistence leads to an opportunity because very few Nagios implementation customers have service contracts. HQ 3.2 has added robust Nagios integration, and it also parses and encapsulates Nagios configuration files.
There were also a lot of intuitive little features that made sense to an old ESM dog like myself. Overall, Hyperic is making all the right moves to position itself as an enterprise player. It has very impressive partners in the application space, giving it an edge over other players in this space. It probably also doesn’t hurt that one of Hyperic’s investors is the “Hanna Montana” of the open source VC community (Benhmark Capital). Lastly, something that is probably less important to most investors but most important to me, I I like these guys.
Topics: hyperic | 7 Comments »
February 9th, 2008 at 2:18 am
[...] The Mighty Two (Part One) Note on new Hyperic release. (tags: little4 itmanagement hyperic) [...]
February 14th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
[...] few weeks back I did my first press briefing ever with Hyperic. Blogging is a strange gig and it brings you to unexpected places. Anyway, it was kind of fun [...]
March 14th, 2008 at 3:12 am
[...] just sounds like a good idea. Benchmark, I have called them the Hanna Montana of VCs is teaming up with Mr. Midas touch to create a great new concept for an SaaS.  Sounds good to [...]
April 21st, 2008 at 11:12 am
[...] OSS ESM vendors is how “enterprisey” are they looking under the hood. In my previous Hyperic article I praised them for starting to look more like an enterprise software product. What I am [...]
August 28th, 2008 at 4:45 am
Haven’t you heard about Osmius?
Osmius is a Open Source Monitoring Tool prepared to monitor almost anything connected to a network. They have an Agent Development Framework, and the engine is build in C++ over ACE (so is real multiplatform and very, vaery fast).
The business view is already integrated using SLA and services in an easy way to understand.
There’s a lot of work to do (we started with the real development a year ago) and it would be nice to receive your impressions and improvements.
http://osmius.net
August 28th, 2008 at 7:48 am
I will check it out.
THanks
October 15th, 2008 at 6:45 am
Where’s Part Two?