COSMOS: IBM, Cisco, Intel, HP and others propose to unify systems management tools

The mission of the proposed COSMOS Project (COmmunity Systems Management Open Source) is to create a standard tools platform upon which software developers can create inter-operable system management tools and plug-ins. "Systems management" encompasses such diverse activities as health monitoring, inventory tracking, deployment modeling, configuration change tracking, and so forth. The project will initially focus on a few specific problem areas including:

• Resource monitoring
• Transaction monitoring and correlation
• Resource modeling

Data collection, correlating data from different sources, and presenting a unified monitoring user interface will be a big part of this. In true Eclipse fashion, several competing companies will work together to create the common framework on which they can build their own differentiated products. They include: IBM, OC Systems, GroundWork, Cisco, Intel, Compuware, HP, and possibly Sybase.

As an aside, if you've never heard of OC Systems, they make a nice tool I've used for instrumenting software applications on the fly called RootCause. In some ways RC's goals are similar to dtrace, but it runs on more systems.