After encountering each other on numerous customer engagements, Hyperic Inc., an open source systems management company, and The OpenNMS Group, an open source network management company, are officially forming a partnership. At the heart of the partnership is an agreement to provide integrated products and services. The first integration product will be released at the end of March.

According to Stacey Schneider, Hyperic’s senior director of marketing, the partnership is natural fit for both companies. “We were both talking to one of the country’s largest healthcare providers who wanted integration between our top-level systems and application management tools along with OpenNMS’ network administration tools,” she said. “We’ve run across each other often at customer sites and it made sense to formalize a partnership.

The first integration phase will meld together various alerts and allow customers to navigate between Hyperic’s HQ product and The OpenNMS Group’s OpenNMS platform. Next week, the two companies will lay out their roadmap for future integrations.

What might this partnership mean in day-to-day terms for data centers? Take a large distributed data center with lots of network traffic, Web servers and database servers. Any problems experienced by end users require IT operations personnel to access information about all aspects of the stack. OpenNMS can monitor the traffic network while Hyperic HQ can monitor application-level performance metrics such as CPU consumption.

The idea, said Schneider, is to give IT operations a more complete view of their environments so that they can get at the root of problems.