GroundWork upgrades open source monitoring software

GroundWork Open Source next week will use the Interop conference in New York to showcase the latest version of its flagship software that the company says now provides better reporting and network management features.

GroundWork is expected to share details about new features in its GroundWork Monitor 5 software products. The company says it added customizable executive dashboard capabilities and integrated Eclipse's BIRT open source reporting engine. The software maker also developed a network management add-on to its systems monitoring product, with which GroundWork Monitor Professional customers can take advantage of network management features including auto-discovery, network mapping and network protocol analysis.

GroundWork last year unveiled GroundWork Monitor, which is an extension of Nagios open source monitoring application. The software runs on a Linux server with memory in disk and can be used either with or without agents. The agent option, recommended by the vendor, essentially uses a Perl script that runs on managed devices, and extracts management information from the device's Management Information Base to send to the central server. Customers also have the option to write plug-ins specific to their environment to broaden the software's monitoring capabilities.

The upgrades could indicate that GroundWork is trying to deliver a more complete network management alternative to existing products from BMC, CA, HP and IBM.

"Reporting is one of the features in management products that you can never have enough of. Customers need to get real-time, historical, trend, analysis and business impact data in their reporting," says Cameron Haight, a research vice president at Gartner. "If GroundWork wants to be a total management provider, it will continue to flesh out the product to provide tools that will help deliver the right data to the right people."

GroundWork customer Sam Lamonica, IT director at general contracting and engineering company Rudolph & Sletten in Foster City, Calif., says his preview of the upgraded software showed it to be promising. He points to features such as performance trending, which enables his team to collect and analyze past data by "running a report," and syslog processing that "allows us to centralize syslog in a single location for ease of management."

Yet more work could be done, he says.

"While this version is a big improvement over the old one, we’d still like to see an easier to use GUI," he says. "There are just too many different tabs to work with in the program and things are hard to find among all these tabs."

The company provides three flavors of its monitoring software: a free for download open source version; a small-business version tailored for organizations with up to 50 servers or networked devices to monitor; and its professional version that is priced at $16,000 per year for enterprise deployments. The add-on network management software costs $9,000.

All upgraded and new GroundWork products are scheduled to be available in mid-October.