New Special Interest Group Focuses on Open Source Monitoring

Events like LinuxWorld highlight the capabilities of hot open source projects, but what of the times in-between these big gatherings? Smaller, more consistent special interest groups allow for focused, idea-driven interactions and offer a deeper look into relevant issues. Frankly, they are more effective at contributing to and preserving particular segments of the open source culture for which intricacies crucial to advancement might be overlooked in larger settings. Open source monitoring now has its own special interest group, Monitoring SIG, organized by GroundWork Open Source in conjunction with BayLISA, the Bay Area's Large Installation Systems Administrators chapter.

Monitoring the network is difficult -- the potential for capturing too much or too little information is high, and without the right tools, it's easy to flood the system or to miss crucial elements. Word of the flexibility, ease, clarity, and lower cost of open source monitoring projects has spread fast, so open source tools are establishing themselves as desirable alternatives to traditional proprietary solutions. RRDTool and MRTG allow for easier collection of the right amount of data from a higher number of network devices. Ganglia monitors different aspects of the network with little strain to the network. Cacti offers clear and sophisticated graphing and charting capabilities. The list of quality open source monitoring projects goes on and on.

A monitoring-oriented group provides a forum for thought leaders to brainstorm, storyboard and plot the future path of development,

The well-attended inaugural Monitoring SIG event in San Francisco last month included IT staff from Cisco and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center among others.

"What's exciting is that interested people can meet and explore issues in the field itself as well as the possibilities of their own technology and the technology of others," said Peter Mui, community manager of GroundWork Open Source. "This next meeting is focused around mapping out the monitoring space. It will be a kind of 'show-and-tell' of monitoring tools that will give attendees a chance to champion or rant about monitoring projects that have had experience with."

The next Monitoring Sig event takes place in San Francisco on November 8. The invitation to attend is open to all and most importantly, food will be provided. For more information, visit BayLISA's website.