Yesterday GroundWork announced the launch of MonitoringForge, probably the first vertical meta-forge of open source projects belonging to a specific software category (IT monitoring).
Talking frequently with David Dennis - Senior Director marketing at GroundWork - I happened to share with him the idea that a neutral open source monitoring à la CMSMatrix was missing. Now that GroundWork decided to start an initiative somehow going towards that direction I asked Tara Spalding, VP Marketing at GroundWork, to comment the news.
Tara, how will you MonitoringForge it in a neutral fashion?
MonitoringForge intends to have community driven governance, and is immediately assembling an advisory board to further harden the agnostic approach for project presentation and participation.
The initiative makes me think about Christian Sarkar “double loop marketing“, and I would like to know more about why you did it.
Today there are too many websites hosting hundreds of open source IT monitoring projects that have inconsistent end user experiences, and are built around a single project or architect. For example, there are 185 unique Nagios-related submitters on SourceForge.net. There are several other projects out there such as Zenoss, Ganglia, Cacti, and of course GroundWork – and combined our developer base overlaps in interest and talent.
I am looking forward to see if Tarus Balog of the OpenNMS fame, Tobias Oetiker of the MRTG/RRDTool fame and all others will join the conversation, at same extent.
If GroundWork will manage to keep it neutral, both open source end-users and customers will benefit of it.
Kudos to GroundWork for the initiative!
About MonitoringForge: With more than 1,700 projects and plugins that are open source licensed, users have an immediate ready-to-go toolset when they visit MonitoringForge.org. All projects are invited to participate by hosting their code on the site, or creating a project front-end that passes through to the existing development.
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