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One of the problems with a competitive market like the network management market is the difficulty of finding good comparative information about the various offerings.
One post I know would be useful is something that compares the various open source network management tools. People are searching for exactly that information and are hitting this website. They can’t be finding anything useful because we don’t have the information they want.
I am currently researching a post comparing the various open source offerings. The first thing I’ve discovered is that a comparison isn’t a simple thing to produce.
One solution would be for me to create a set of criteria and then ask the various projects to fill in the information for their particular project. My suspicion is soliciting feedback from the projects themselves would very quickly turn into a bun fight as people challenge the criteria I’ve defined.
In the end, the best way to create the comparison is to do the research myself. But first I need to define the criteria upon which the projects will be compared.
When I’ve done some further research on the criteria I’ll post again. After some initial brainstorming the following basic criteria immediately spring to mind: platform(s), user interface (GUI, Web, etc), configuration interface, project age, licence, device discovery, mapping, event correlation, configuration management, trouble ticketing, alarming, monitoring. Some of those items are very broad so would need to be broken down further.
Feedback is as always appreciated. 
Update: Added support, reporting and extensibility (scripting) to the criteria
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That sounds like quite a project. One other item to rate the NMS’s on is scripting/extensibility as relates to monitoring and reporting.
Just my 2 cents.
@Steven – good point. scripting & reporting is now added to my list.
I have been thinking along the same lines. I think the most important criteria is who are the reference customers and how many are there? The next is the blog reference count and mentions in Technorati, Digg and Del.iscio.us. This is not feature set measurement but gives an idea of what customers are doing with the stuff.
I started with a set of feature sets at http://thinkingproblemmanagement.blogspot.com/2008/01/infrastructure-managers-checklist-for_27.html
My idea was to populate each product and give them a score out of 10. I can email you my spreadsheet if you contact me off line.
I think the feature set is important but so is the soft stuff? And you are correct! It is a bunch of work!
@Ronald – thanks for the info. My suspicion is that I’m going to start with a very shallow comparison first, then work my way down. That means that I should be able to get something out in a reasonable amount of time.
Did you ever get a first cut done on this? I think it would be very useful.
@Orv – The first tranche is here: http://www.openxtra.co.uk/blog/open-source-network-management-comparison-platform/ … more to follow soon. I’ve set aside Thursday & Friday this week for it. It may have to wait till the end of the month before I publish because I’m on holiday next week.