Looking forward with joy and exitment:)

Back from a really nice summer and with so many great things in the pipe. We are on verge of releasing op5 Monitor 5.0. This is the most ambitious release since we started the company. As you might know our product Monitor is based on the well known open source project Nagios.  Nagios is the greatest OSS project ever for monitoring IT and has been around for many years. One of the drawbacks with Nagios is the GUI. The GUI was design and architectured many years ago and before Nagios became the defacto standard for OSS monitoring. The community has had a number of attempts to upgrade the GUI over the years, however non has really succeeded. Different vendors (including op5)  that have utilized Nagios in there solutions have had different methods of tweaking the GUI to be more intuitive and flexible, but most of them are proprietary and as they all in different ways integrate with the existing CGI GUI the flexibility have been greatly reduced. Another challenge have also been to assure compability with future versions of Nagios.

The GUI is for obvious reasons really important. As   information about the IT systems gets accumulated in the system the a key ROI driver is to make this information available and presentable to as many people as possible. The more people that can get value out of the information the better. As people and their roles within the organisation are different, as so are their purpose and why they get value of the info. All this requires a flexible and modern GUI that enables the users to choose what, when & how they want the info.

Another key reason for the GUI project was all the requests for enhancements (RFE) we get from different users. Many RFE’s are really good, smart and easy to program. Hove ever implementing a new feature will many times need adjustments to the GUI. (No point of having a feature that you can not see, possible configure or alter). This can be done and if it’s a few changes then you can probably keep track of them manually. But if its a lot of them – and if you need to guarantee full support and compatibility time over time, version over version – it quite quickly becomes a challenge and huge cost driver. So it becomes a bottleneck for RFE’s in general.

These are just a few of the reasons to why we decided to start an ambitious project back in December. The Project was named Ninja and stand for: “Nagios Is Now Just Awesome”. We early decide to go full open source on this project – it was a no brainer as we wanted to create a new GUI and even though we have some pretty good programmers (a little understatement – they are really among the best:) this is GUI and who better to evaluate, priorities, give feedback or just plane ideas then the users of the system out there.

The Ninja project is architecture to directly add on to a Nagios installation, and will be an integrated part of Monitor 5.x.

Using Monitor 5.x with the integrated functions of Merlin, Nacoma (webconfig) and op5 reports will enable so many new ways to architecture a set up, use multiple database back ends, display information and all in a friendly, flexible PHP based GUI.

I think it is a little bit like Symbian (nokia etc.) vs. Iphone – Nokia is selling lots more phones today – but IPhone has x10 in applications – and most of them generated by the users! It’s great and it shows the power of the users.

On this topic we are also introducing support for “Widgets” / “Dashlets” in the GUI. This will enable user add customized information with direct access from   the GUI itself. Again – all done withing a framework (we use kohanaphp to minimize the workload).

In just a few weeks we are ready! The first release have a clear target to be minimum the same or better in all aspects compared to the existing GUI. However all based on PHP so it’s a little bit like opening a new toolbox, the old one had a single hammer, this new one will have a wrench, screwdriver, adjustable spanner etc. etc. all in all making old and new RFE’s to our product much easier to implement and support for a greater customer value.   

So – this excites me:) We who live our days every day with customers, questions, support issues etc. etc all just focusing on achieving the best monitor / control of IT, we know what these system can do – soon we will also be able to show it:))

If you want a little video (non technical) – check this…

ps – you will also find the beta download on the link.

Cheers / J