Hyperic has released Hyperic HQ, its Java-based, cross-platform enterprise management platform, under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Hyperic has also announced a new Hyperic HQ community portal dedicated to user collaboration and code sharing. HQ is composed of a monitoring server and several agents featuring comprehensive enterprise resource monitoring, auto-discovery, cross-platform architecture and a comprehensively documented XML-based plugin system. The platform boasts a fully featured download and 60-minute setup and configure time. HQ's auto-discovery capability gives inventory of all the hardware, software and services in an infrastructure. HQ also includes a Plug-in Development Kit - a free, downloadable open source development kit suitable for developing plug-ins that support specific software and hardware. HQ is built on and has full support for open source technologies such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, Tomcat, JBoss, and PostgreSQL. Source downloads are available from hyperic.com, hyperic.org and sourceforge.net. Look for binary versions of the current source release by July 24. What do you think of HQ?

Looks like a comprehensive suite, too bad it requires setting up Oracle or Postgres if you are not already managing these systems. Would be better with a built in database, such as HSQL or Derby.

If you download the prebuilt version, you don't have to install a separate database as it includes postgres. It is quite an impressive project. I had been looking at several OSS options when they released the free version and was sold when I saw what it did with auto-discovery. They don't do a very good job of laying out what features are in the OSS version and which are in the enterprise. For me, the big missing features are log aggregation and actions. But still very impressive. I hope it takes hold in the community. --Tim

Tim, Thanks for noting that we need to do a better job of clarifying the differences between the open source and enterprise versions. This is something that we will look to do a better job of in the next few days. In the meantime, I'm happy to hear that you have had a positive experience with it so far. I assume you've posted to our tracker at http://jira.hyperic.com/ - we love feedback. Thanks, John Mark

I have not yet posted any feedback (I'm currently working furiously on the site that hyperic will be monitoring), but will do so when I get the chance. I installed the server right after your announcement last month about it and the plans to go OS. I've since recommended it to several folks to consider for their monitoring needs. Though I doubt we will go with the enterprise edition (we're a non-profit with only a handfull of servers and no full time staff), the folks I mentioned it to might very well choose that route. I hope this movement is successful for you. I did download the source and build it, just to do a quick check. Worked well. I already had JBoss installed, which I believe was the only external dependency aside from ant. I'd have to echo the sentiment about database usage. I don't think HSQL is an appropriate database for anything beyond simple evaluation of Hyperic. Though the agents are reasonably lightweight, the server does some real work. The fact that Postgres comes with the binary versions and worked flawlessly for me on RHEL4 makes it less of an issue, in my opinion. I've had mixed success with Derby and though I'd like to like it, it hasn't won me over yet. --Tim

The binary bundles include postgres on all the OS's that the HQ server runs on (Win32, Solaris, Linux, HP/UX). We actually tried Cloudscape back in the earlier days of this project, and unfortunately it could not handle the ammount of concurrency that HQ requires. Not sure how much different that is now that Derby is in place, but PostgreSQL is awesome, and we manage it internally. Now that the source is out, we encourage others to help port to other DB's. MySQL is supported, but needs some work. Derby support would be something we'd encourage if there was interest. -javier

Is there any feature comparison page for the OSS and the enterprise version? Eike

We have basic descriptions of each on the product pages - http://www.hyperic.com/products/ent_features.html http://www.hyperic.com/products/features.html Does this help? -John Mark

The links do help in a comparison, yes. However, I have always greatly appreciated being able to visit one page with a point-by-point comparison between versions of a product.

I want to make it clear that HQ is cross-platform in a big way. Agents and the server both run on multiple OS flavors - Windows, Mac, Linux and various flavors of Unix. Also, the enterprise management aspect includes everything in the enterprise - both proprietary and open source services running on your network. We can manage Oracle instances just as easily as MySQL. The software runs just as well on Windows as it does on Linux. The point is, although HQ is open source, it is built to thrive in a mixed environment.

*This* is how system management should be. Took a couple minutes to install the server, agent, and shell on my workstation. The agent, upon installation, automatically picked up just about every service worth monitoring without an ounce of configuration. Really, I was just plain impressed when I saw it was logging statistics on each individual postgresql table.