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One of the great things about sourceforge, apart from the cool services they provide free to open source projects, is that they provide statistics about the projects they host.
One of the stats that sourceforge provides is a history of project downloads. You can’t compare the stats though. So I thought it would be interesting to compare the downloads for the major open source network management projects.
The volume of downloads is indicative, like search trends, of the relative mind share for each project. Download volume isn’t a perfect measure, but it is one of the best available. I doubt even the projects themselves have an absolutely accurate idea of how many installations they have.
I entered the download data from sourceforge for the last year into a Google Spreadsheet. I then graphed the data. See the graphs below. The data covers the previous year, from November 2006 through to October 2007.
Figure 1: Open Source Network Management Projects by Monthly Downloads
Figure 2: Open Source Network Management Projects Total Downloads
I’ve compared five projects: Nagios, OpenNMS, Zenoss, Hyperic & Groundwork Open Source all of whom host their downloads at sourceforge.
I doubt the graph will surprise too many people. The graph is similar to the Google Trends data. Both Nagios and Zenoss are vying for the top position. What has surprised me over the last year has been the stability of the number of Nagios downloads.
If the growth of the “new wave” is coming from other open source projects, it isn’t coming from either Nagios or OpenNMS, the most mature “old skool” open source network management projects.
I don’t think there is much doubt that both Zenoss & Hyperic have brought commercial levels of setup and configuration to the open source network management market. And yet, Nagios a tool that relies on manual configuration, is still gaining traction.
Once you have a loyal community, by delivering and supporting successive releases over an extended time, users are loath to move to another project.
Perhaps perversely, the harder a tool is to learn, the more reluctant users are to migrate to another tool. A kind of open source Stockholm syndrome.
I’m sure that all of the new wave players understand the value of community…that’s why they are going hell for leather building them. 
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I’m missing at least three other network monitoring systems:
+ Quest Big Brother (Open Source, but not really free): http://bb4.org/
+ Hobbit (GNU GPL, a enhanced rewite of BB in C): http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/
+ Pandora Free Monitoring System (FMS): http://pandora.sourceforge.net/
@Axel – If I’d tried to put *every* open source tool on the graph then it would have been very hard to discern any information. I was trying to compare the “new wave” with a couple of the better known “old wave” projects.
I hope by now that the IT bloggers have stopped using source forge download count as a metric. These numbers can be gamed, they obviously are, and don’t represent actual usage (for too many reasons to post here), and some open source applications actually fold into the packaging systems of the host platform: “yum opennms” ; “apt-get opennms” hits the yum/apt repositories by passing SourceForge. Installing packages by downloading from SourceForge is a system administrator’s worst nightmare. Some of the NMS applications have to be downloaded from SourceForge and then built and installed missing the packaging system all together. They often also include dependency software (i.e. RRD, PostgreSQL) that should be installed by packaging for security and software inventory reasons.
Good luck with your RRD project. Looking forward to seeing that (grin).
@David – given that many open source projects fold into the various packaging systems it seems reasonable to think that their usage will be broadly the same for each project therefore the download stats do at least provide some insight into the relative mind share for each project.
Oh, and thanks for wishing me good luck with PowerTime. I really appreciate you taking the time to encourage me (grin).
I miss also Osmius (http://osmius.net)
The production version have been released in last July,so the download graphs aren’t very impressive.. let’s see what happen.