With a shortage of personnel continuing to plague IT teams across the globe, IT administrators have increasingly relied on external technology and tools to help reduce the workload of their teams and increase the reliability and performance of their infrastructure.
IT administrators most commonly seek the assistance of solutions that help with managing and monitoring multiplatform environments. They need visibility of enterprise-wide performance, automated reporting, and centralized management in order to keep pace with modern digital needs.
Rarely are they given a blank check to purchase everything they need to make this happen. Organizations that need the functionality of an enterprise monitoring and management solution but don’t have the budget often turn to open-source tools. These tools are budget friendly and can be highly effective with the proper personnel operating them; however, they also have important limitations that potential customers need to be aware of.
What Is an Open-Source Monitoring and Management Tool?
Open-source tools like Nagios, Incinga, Shinken, Zabbix, and PRTG are software that is distributed under a license that allows users to make modifications to its source code. This enables organizations to customize the software to fit their exact IT needs.
What Are the Advantages of Using an Open-Source Tool?
Price
Most open-source tools offer a core model that can be used completely free of any charge. They offer foundational monitoring capabilities that in-house developers can modify to fit their organization’s environment. Beyond the core model, a lot of open-source vendors offer add-on modules for more advanced or niche capabilities that are available for purchase. It is also important to note that support is not always free, and you may be limited to a certain number of support calls per year.
Flexibility
The biggest benefit of open-source software is the flexibility it provides. If you’re a developer or programmer and know how to code, you can customize the software to do exactly what you need it to. For example, Nagios is one of the favorites in the open-source community for network monitoring. They offer plenty of flexibility to work well with other products. If you have a strong development skillset and don’t mind getting your hands dirty, this tool can be an asset to you.
What Are the Disadvantages of Using an Open-Source Tool?
Time Consuming and Labor Intensive
The flexibility that open-source tools provide can be a major benefit for IT teams, however, this flexibility comes with a price. It can take countless hours for development to modify an open-source tool to include custom features. With the skills and setup required, what starts out as a “free” solution ends up consuming valuable resources in the form of time and effort. The effort required to get an open-source tool off the ground is a problem for even the most experienced developers. So, if you’re counting on your team to learn as they go, customizing the tool to your liking will take much longer and the result could be unsatisfactory.
Lack of Updates and Security Fixes
Free open-source tools are not backed by a development team that puts out regular updates and software improvements. When it comes to the foundational components of the software, what you see is what you get. That means any bugs or security vulnerabilities that exist may never be fixed. Small tweaks that could save you a lot of time in the long run will never be made and security patches will never be put out – meaning you could be putting any data that interacts with the software at risk of being stolen or altered.
Minimal Support
Most open-source tools either offer support in a very limited capacity or not at all. Those that offer limited support allow users a maximum of 10 support calls per year. After this amount has been reached, they can charge as much as $500 per additional support instance. Unless you’re comfortable with paying for additional instances, you will likely find yourself spending considerable time scanning online forums for answers to simple “how to” questions. All in all, if you don’t have extensive experience working with open-source tools, it is very likely that implementing them will require more support than what you will have access to.
Not Native to IBM i
For organizations that run on the IBM i, it is important to note that open-source tools cannot run native to this platform. This means the software cannot interrogate the system at the OS level, resulting in slower response times to events. This additional layer of communication also introduces security concerns relating to the interception of data as it is transmitted to and from the tool. Non-native tools also come with stability concerns, as a lost connection to the server can result in processes stopping entirely.
How Does Halcyon Compare to Open-Source Tools?
Halcyon is Fortra’s all-in-one solution suite for monitoring, managing, automating, and reporting on multi-platform environments consisting of Linux, Windows, AIX, and IBM i. With Halcyon, customers can automate the monitoring of their servers and applications, the supervising of system tasks, and reporting on SLAs and performance. All of these features can be tracked and modified within Halcyon’s centralized management console.
Halcyon is an IT team’s one-stop shop for managing and monitoring critical IT systems, core applications, and business processes running on IBM Power hardware. When configured correctly, Halcyon can absorb the workload of at least one senior operator.
Unlike open-source tools, there’s no need for programming the product for hours on end. Halcyon is easy to install and is ready out of the box with a multitude of features and capabilities that will reduce the workload of IT administrators and create more reliable IT processes. Halcyon is not free – however, it does come with best-in-class support in the form of experienced professionals ready to offer live assistance and a regularly updated support portal that features plenty of helpful resources.
Want to See Halcyon in Action?
Schedule a personalized demonstration to see for yourself the efficiency that Halcyon can bring to your IT processes.
