NetworkWorld compared the OSS system management products from Zenoss, Hyperic and Groundwork. NWW results: 1. Zenoss-4.0 Pros: Excellent discovery of network resources; intuitive user interface. Cons: Needs a visual design environment for customizing reports. 2. Hyperic-3.6 Pros: Impressive, complex thresholds; good reports. Cons: Remediation is a very manual process. 3. Groundwork-3.1 Pros: Good, basic network NetworkWorld compared the OSS system management products from Zenoss, Hyperic and Groundwork. NWW results: 1. Zenoss-4.0 Pros: Excellent discovery of network resources; intuitive user interface. Cons: Needs a visual design environment for customizing reports. 2. Hyperic-3.6 Pros: Impressive, complex thresholds; good reports. Cons: Remediation is a very manual process. 3. Groundwork-3.1 Pros: Good, basic network monitoring. Cons: Lacks dashboards; no ability to track Service Level Agreements. One potentially interesting factoid is that each of these products has a different technology behind it. Zenoss is Python, Hyperic is Java and I think Groundwork is Perl with a bunch of PHP and Java. FiveRuns (not reviewed) was all written in Ruby so I guess you can solve the same problem in many different ways. (Apologies if I got those programming languages wrong.) Open Source