Announcing HQ 3.0 Beta

This morning we’ve released the first beta of the next generation of the HQ platform. This release includes a number of significant changes in both the internals of the platform, as well as the feature set offered as part of the open source product. The internal changes to the platform are significant, but I’d like to take a minute to talk about the changes to the open source feature set.

Back in 2002 we designed HQ to be a platform that provides multiple management features (discovery, monitoring, etc.) implemented through a single web based portal, and with support for any technology. We spent the better part of 2 years working on maturing a platform which delivered on this promise and listening to our customers as they helped influence our direction. In July of 2006 we open sourced what was by then a very mature solution, and took what we considered to be the next logical step in the evolution of our product and our company. The process of open sourcing a product with over 700,000 lines of code is by no means trivial. Through that process we chose a license we believe benefits our community (GPL v2) and offered not just code but a ready to run, secure solution for managing whatever mix of applications, infrastructure, and hardware you threw at us. After all, we felt that the fact that our product was now open source should not imply that the solution is any less useable or easy to deply for the members of our community than for our enterprise customers. We’ve always maintained that “open source management != management of open source”

Now, with a new year ahead of us, we mark the next step in our development of the best solution for managing your IT infrastructure. HQ 3.0 brings with it a complete set of platform features which were previously unavailable in our open source offering. In particular, our event management feature which tracks logs and configuration, and our remote control feature which helps you take corrective action on your environment directly through the HQ portal. These two features are now part of the open source HQ platform because we believe that they are a crucial element to managing any type of environment. Additionally, HQ 3.0 introduces a whole new dynamic dashboard which allows you to build custom NOC views that automatically update themselves using AJAX/REST. Oh, and “one more thing”… 3.0 also introduces multi-level alert escalation, so you can design workflows that automatically escalate any alert to the right people in your team.

This combination of new features and updated performance and security fixes make HQ 3.0 the most complete, scaleable, and powerful open source management solution out there. We invite everyone to take the beta for a spin, file bugs, and give us feedback on how you like it.

-Javier

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