If you’ve been reading along for a while, you might be learning this stuff at the same speed I am. I’m getting back into my hands-on days, building things, configuring things, breaking things. Not people. Things. I still like building both, but there’s something about watching a system come to life that reminds me of what it used to feel like before I spent most of my time in meetings.
The open source versus commercial debate could go on forever. If you read my earlier post about the debate exercise, I hope this one doesn’t end the same way.
My personal opinion: there aren’t winners or losers. It’s about what you have available to you.
What I have available to me in my lab environment is a desire to reduce costs, which, oddly enough, mirrors exactly what I do for a living. The difference is that the entire IT department in my house is one guy. Systems, networking, DevOps, help desk, yours truly.
The counter to that: if I get hit by a bus, it stops. Lights out. It doesn’t go anymore.
That works fine for me and my house. It may or may not work in a corporate environment. What skills does your team have? What do you need? What’s your risk tolerance? All the decisions you have to make at the office. I don’t have to make them at home.
Is open source the best idea for my home lab? Absolutely. It has essentially zero cost. The alternative, $240 to license a Windows agent as an inventory tool on my personal laptops,I could just click “accept” and move on. At home, the security risk is mine to take. At work? Not so much.
And then there’s the people question. What does your team look like? Are they Linux command-line types, or are they Windows clickers? Different tools for different teams. Open source sometimes means replacing the software. Sometimes it means replacing the people. I don’t say that lightheartedly. That’s a real decision. It’s not cynical. It’s practical.
In my house, I’m trying to get better with the command line. I’m comfortable in Linux. I’m not great. I probably still have to research 25 to 50 percent of what I’m doing because the flags kill me, and I’m running man pages constantly. ChatGPT and Google are my best friends. But it works for me.
So: we run open source monitoring at the office, I don’t fully understand it yet, and I’m building it at home to learn. And I’m cheap. Is it better or worse than commercial? That’s for you to decide.
I’m just working on my little home lab, and I’d encourage you to do exactly the same. You’ll learn something new. You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. You might even figure out if it works for the company. Put all that together and you’re more valuable than you were before, and your company is more valuable with you in it.
Have a nice night. See you soon.