letThemCodeCake

I’ll be honest, I am a lot better at getting a project out of the door than maintaining it in the long run. I think this is a common problem for a lot of developers who are more interested in the creation than the sustainability of a project. However, I have also come to learn that, like it or not, I am going to have to do some level of system monitoring and management if I want to be able to fund those future projects. There is no point in creating an app that is going to fail the next day.

That being said, I decided to take a little time to look into the available resources out there for systems or server monitoring. While there are definitely quite a few solutions available, I needed to start on a budget. I deciced to go with Hyperic for myriad reasons, but here are just a few of them…

1. It’s open source. Or, at least, there is a free open source version available to get me started. Frankly, I don’t have the time or money to waste on a closed-source app that might turn out not to serve my needs. More importantly, with companies going downhill fast, I didn’t want to get tied down by proprietary software which might not be updated if the company itself goes out of business. For me, this was a no brainer.
2. Easy installation. I am not a sys admin. I am a programmer. I recognize the difference and I am not prepared to hire a sysadmin at this time. I needed something I could install, setup and deploy quickly. The open-source part of it alone made installation a lot quicker. I didn’t even need to speak with a service rep to get started.
3. Scaling up. At some rapidly approaching point, I am going to have to get some professional help for these projects. Putting together my own solution would mean that I would have to train folks to get up to speed. Using Hyperic means I can just upgrade to their professional products and use their own existing support community.

I won’t pretend that Hyperic is the perfect solution for everyone. For example, I have to get the Enterprise edition for role-based access control and external authentication with LDAP - two things I am actually interested in eventually. However, compared to everything else available, this definitely made the most sense for my current projects and my projected growth. I definitely think that for systems management and server monitoring that Hyperic is the right choice.