Nagios is dead! Long live Icinga!

[Julian Hein]

Hello,

My name is Julian, I am the Managing Director of Netways and I would like to comment on some of the questions raised or accusations made. I am sorry that I cannot reply to the original thread, but my email address was removed from the mailing list.

As everybody else, I also think that the situation we are now in, is very very bad and I hated supporting all the things we did on Wednesday. But I think we had no other choice.

Am 06.05.09 17:56 schrieb "Ethan Galstad" unter <egalstad at nagios.com>:

> 1. Nagios is NOT dead.  It's been around for 10 years now and will
> continue to be alive and well for many more to come.

Of course it is not dead. I even think that Nagios is currently at the top of the hype cycle. Almost everybody talks about it and it is now even known by upper management and the suits. To give an example, here in Germany, there is no major car manufacturer that does not already use Nagios or at least has concrete plans to do so.

But Nagios will not stay at the top of this hype cycle, because numerous alternatives are currently rising or are already there and are trying to overtake Nagios. Almost in every meeting with prospect customers we are confronted with questions about other open source monitoring tools, like Zabbix, Zenoss, Pandora FMS, etc. and how Nagios compares to them. At the moment it is still possible to convince people in favor of Nagios by telling them about the huge and active community, the large number of add-ons or plugins. But I am pretty sure that, given the actual development speed of Nagios, that in 1 or 2 years the other tools will have won.

Another example: Just last week we hosted another open source conference and had one talk by the creater of Zabbix. In the audience there were some long time Nagios users, who said after the talk, that they would give Zabbix a try, because it looked so much better and had so many more features providing less pain compared to Nagios. They even started posting about Zabbix on the http://www.nagios-portal.org forum.

Much bigger evidence of this development are studies and comparisons people make and put online about different open source monitoring systems. Almost in every case Nagios is no longer the first tool of choice. Best case it is second. One good example is here (just jump to the conclusion on page 148)
http://www.skills-1st.co.uk/papers/jane/open_source_mgmt_options.pdf

> 2. While it may appear that things are slow to the community, many
> things are happening behind the scenes, including:
> 
> - The rollout of annual support contracts for Nagios.  We've been
> working very hard since January to bring this to fruition and they are
> scheduled to be available in the next 6 weeks or so.
>
> - We've had to spend considerable resources protecting the Nagios
> project against commercial entities that would endanger its future.
> Netways is the biggest company that is violating the Nagios trademark,
> causing us many legal headaches, and using it in a manner which is
> confusing to people who are not "in the know".  We have made several
> attempts over the past months to resolve this amicably with Netways, but
> they have refused to respond to us, let alone work to resolve this
> issue.  From what I can tell from our experiences with them thus far,
> Netways appears to be using "the community" to exploit the Nagios
> project.  Their actions have endangered Nagios and its future.  

Yes, there are issues, but I think both sides have made mistakes here. I just send an email to Ethan with a suggestion to settle this. Nevertheless the fork has nothing to do with the trademark. How could it? I cannot see any reason why that would make sense for us.

> If we
> weren't having to deal with headaches they caused, I would have had more
> time in the past few months to actually do development.  I plan on
> outlining the challenges we've faced with this, as well as our plans to
> work with and enhance the community at the Op5 Nordic Nagios meet next
> month.
>
> 3. It would appear that this fork has been orchestrated by Netways in a
> rather underhanded manner, which doesn't surprise me at all given their
> actions in the past.  Over time, others may come to see that Netways may
> not be the best company to associate with due to their ethics and
> business practices.

That is not true: 

First, we were approached by members of the German community, not the other way round. Second, this fork is supported by 50% of Nagios Enterprises Advisory Board. These are the people that Ethan said were there to advise him in community matters. They tried multiple times to bring all the problems, issues and thoughts to the table. They not even talked and mailed, they also did actual work, like implementing a patch queue, which was ignored by Ethan.

We are not just users here. A lot of the positive things of Nagios derive from the add-ons and the community. So the fork contributors have contributed very much to the previous success of Nagios, by developing add-ons organizing conferences and workshops and so on. And they do not want to see this dying, because Nagios is to good to die.

Julian

-- 
Neu: GMX FreeDSL Komplettanschluss mit DSL 6.000 Flatrate + Telefonanschluss für nur 17,95 Euro/mtl.!* http://dslspecial.gmx.de/freedsl-surfflat/?ac=OM.AD.PD003K11308T4569a

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The NEW KODAK i700 Series Scanners deliver under ANY circumstances! Your
production scanning environment may not be a perfect world - but thanks to
Kodak, there's a perfect scanner to get the job done! With the NEW KODAK i700
Series Scanner you'll get full speed at 300 dpi even with all image 
processing features enabled. http://p.sf.net/sfu/kodak-com