About 5 years ago I came across OpenNMS, an attempt to build an open-source network management system, and found it was written in Java (so had to be slow), wasn’t very pretty (so didn’t look good in demos), and didn’t play very nicely with AIX (so was totally useless for my job at the time).

Fast forward 5 years, and OpenNMS has evolved into probably the best performing network management tool out there, all available for free from the OpenNMS website, and it’s even replacing existing Tivoli NetCool implementations which means it’s either very good, or everyone who knows NetCool has retired..