An Open Invitation

Greetings and Salutations,

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Jim Phillips. I'm an independent consultant who has occupied many different roles within the Information Technology world. It seems that over the last several years, my choices in contracts have led me down the path towards becoming an expert in enterprise monitoring. I can't claim that I'm THE expert by any stretch, but I think I can hold my own. My background is in systems and applications management. I have written some impressive tools for monitoring and managing systems, but they have been small, single function tools written in Perl. I don't have the programming experience necessary to create a feature complete product.

I've started this blog as an information gathering and recruiting tool. My intention is to design and develop the "ultimate" enterprise monitoring system, and then to unleash it upon the world as both an Open Source platform with commercial support, and a hosted solution. To do this, and more importantly, to do it right, I need help from the community. I'd like input from engineers at large and small companies on best practices for monitoring. I myself will be writing a series of articles on this blog discussing my experiences in monitoring and what I feel should be included in a comprehensive monitoring solution and I openly invite anyone to either expand upon my ideas or completely pick them apart in the user comments -- I'm not afraid of a little public humiliation if it makes for a higher quality product. I hope to assemble a core team of subject matter experts in areas such as Servers, Networking, Unix, Windows, Applications, Facilities, Security, eCommerce, Web Farms, and a host of others. These experts will be invited to write for this blog and publish articles on monitoring with respect to his or her area of specialty.

In addition to engineers helping me to define the requirements for the solution, I'm going to need to enlist the support of developers to bring this dream to fruition. The requirements for the solution haven't yet been defined, so I can't yet say what special skills will be required of these developers, but I hope to be able to put together a core team of skilled professional developers, and also enlist the aid of the open source community to help test and create ancillary tools and plug-ins for the system. I can say there will be a need for user interface designers and web application developers, as I absolutely want the system to employ a standards compliant web interface for the user.

This may seem like a lofty goal for the open source community. As with many open source projects, this one will begin with no funding. I don't want it to stay that way forever. I've already enabled Google AdSense on the blog, and I'll be establishing other channels through which the community can make financial, hardware, and software donations necessary for the development of the project. Once the product reaches a releasable state, we'll start bundling support contracts, and putting our Subject Matter Experts into consulting roles. If everything goes well, what is now a volunteer effort may become a profitable operation with full time employment opportunities for developers, subject matter experts, and support personnel. But the product will always remain Open.

So welcome one and all to the beginning of a dream. Let's work together to make it a reality.

Cheers,

Jim Phillips

PS, Until I've established a better mechanism, please use the comments to contact me if you're interested in participating.