IT Management & Cloud Podcast #44 – Ethan Galstad & Nagios

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This week, John and I are joined by Ethan Galstad, the “father of Nagios.” Having caught up on the news in the previous episode, we spend the entire time talking about Nagios, Ethan’s history with it, and Nagios Enterprise‘s present and future.

First, Ethan gives us a quick overview of Nagios, the open source monitoring framework used by (Ethan & co. estimate) 250,000 users world-wide. Following this, we start out talking about different scenarios where Nagios is used. And then I get ask Ethan to give us a brief of architectural overview of Nagios. John asks about events vs. collecting all data and Nagio’s take on that divide.

In the context of enterprise installs, John asks Ethan if he see lots shelf-ware out there. That gets Ethan to talk about several sites he gone in that use Nagios along-side Big 4 offerings. Next, I ask Ethan about the commercial services around Nagios. They’re building up several support deals, and have been doing some service engagements.

John asks about Nagios scaling – the biggest installs, how many nodes typically get used. I also ask Ethan a question I get asked a fair amount myself: why hasn’t Ethan started a company like others have done in the open source IT Management space? After discussing it, this gets Ethan into a discussion of how he’s like to see Nagios commercialized, keeping closer to the open source way of thinking than doing things like, say node limits.

John gets into forking open source projects which leads to the forking of Nagios a month ago. Ethan tells us what his reaction at the time and then the resulting community management Ethan and Nagios folks have been doing afterwards. We also talk about ICINGA, the recent fork of Nagios.

Finally, him being up in the Twin Cities, I ask him what the tech scene in Minneapolis/St. Paul is like.

Disclosure: IBM, Zenoss, GroundWork, and Hyperic/SpringSource are clients, as is HP. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.