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Over the past five years we have witnessed an acceleration of open source software (OSS) adoption by both service provider and enterprises alike. As Gartner stated in a November 2008 report, the primary advantages for customers adopting OSS tools were lower cost of ownership, ease of implementation, investment protection against a single vendor and faster time to market.
These key advantages have held true for the open source industry time and again, enabling it to gain significant market share across the entire IT stack, from operating system to middleware to tools to business applications and across enterprises and service providers (see the discussion on this subject on the microSperience blog). In fact, in the Network and System Management (NSM) space, there is already a wide selection of open source monitoring tools that have gained a broad following.