Tying in applications management with your network management systems may be more complicated when you're using open source tools, which generally need a bit more care and feeding than their commercially packaged counterparts. But our Product Leadership survey respondents were quick to give a nod and the bronze medal to the open source OpenNMS. One user cheered, "Open source options all the way!"

OpenNMS was designed as an inexpensive replacement for large network and systems management suites such as HP OpenView. It periodically checks that services are available, isolates problems, collects performance information, and helps resolve outages. It can incorporate applications monitoring and is especially flexible when it comes to homegrown, customized apps.

The platform scored highest in logging, monitoring and reporting, with 63% of survey respondents rating it good or excellent. It also fared well in ability to identify network problems, measuring traffic against defined benchmarks, and ease of management and maintenance.