As a managed hosting company, Contegix by necessity has to contend with every major operating system. But to run its own business, Contegix is an open source shop. “We run Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said CEO Matthew Porter, “and we use Hyperic as the core of our management and monitoring systems.”

From its St. Louis data center, Contegix uses Hyperic’s open source HQ management tool to monitor its own applications, and customers can use the system to get their own metrics, even if “they run any operating system on the planet,” Porter said.

Initially, Porter balked at the prospect of installing Hyperic because he didn’t want to put an agent on every machine. However, Porter also wanted the ability to do in-depth monitoring of applications, and not just take stock of the network. The other tools that did both application-performance and network monitoring were SNMP-based, Porter said. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with SNMP, but our network engineers would have to become experts in it,” Porter said. “We made a financial decision to go with Hyperic and install agents because it was expensive to train our engineers.”

Some customers with servers that were three-to-four years old needed more RAM to run agents, and Contegix provided them with the memory they needed. Contegix now collects 25,000 metrics per minute via Hyperic and provides its managed services customers with the ability to set their own thresholds and parameters.