GroundWork Open Source Monitor
By Barry Nance
,
Network World
, 06/18/2007
- Share/Email
- Tweet This
- Print
In contrast to Zenoss Core and Hyperic HQ, GroundWork Open Source’s free-for-the-download open source network monitoring and
management product, called GroundWork Monitor, is quite basic and lacking in features.
We didn’t test the vendor’s GroundWork Monitor Professional product (which has a $16,000 annual subscription fee) or its GroundWork
Monitor Small Business product for fewer than 50 devices ($8,000 per year), which the company claims add a better user interface
with a customizable dashboard as well as SLA business reports and support for monitoring a greater variety of devices.
We found GroundWork Monitor to be essentially an entry-level monitoring and management tool.
Although it lacks many of the monitoring features (such as accurate discovery of our devices and servers) and sophisticated
threshold settings of Zenoss Core and Hyperic HQ, GroundWork Monitor does do a good job of detecting problems and notifying
administrators of those problems. GroundWork Monitor alerted us, via e-mail and pager, whenever we subjected the network to
router, server or switch errors.
Drilling down to network fault, event or historical data through GroundWork Monitor’s user interface requires a few clicks.
The browser-based user interface is simple and unadorned, but it did provide us with real-time status views, historical data
for trending and fault lists for troubleshooting follow-up.
GroundWork Monitor completely lacks the remediation features of Zenoss Core and Hyperic HQ for automatically fixing problems
whose solution consists of, for example, deleting disk files, rebooting a server or restarting a Windows background service.
Extending GroundWork Monitor via programming to query the Nokia D50 unit was fairly easy and took only a few days to code
and thoroughly test. GroundWork Monitor is a compendium of various open source efforts, including Nagios (developed by Ethan
Galstad), Ganglia, RRDtool, Nmap, Sendpage and MySQL.
GroundWork Monitor runs on Red Hat Linux Enterprise, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and CentOS. The online documentation is too brief and lacks explanations for
many of the programming design approaches in GroundWork Monitor. GroundWork Monitor installs in less than an hour, and you
can even obtain a bootable CD-ROM version of GroundWork Monitor.
< Return to introduction
Partner Content
Blue Stripe Software
www.bluestripe.com/
Improving Application Performance Troubleshooting
Diagnosing why an application is slow is hard, at times taking days or weeks to isolate and resolve. This paper explains the challenges involved using current management tools, provides a 'wish list' for application management and analysis, and explains the need for an application system-wide approach that monitors entire applications, not components.
Download Whitepaper
Virtual Vigilance: Managing Application Performance in Virtual Environments
This paper highlights the impact of virtualization on application performance. "Managing Application Performance in Virtual Environments" states: "Best-in-Class organizations are predominately taking actions around improving visibility across both physical and virtual systems, assessing the business impact of application performance and understanding interdependencies of applications in virtualized environments."
Download Whitepaper
Application Service Requests: The Missing Link for Pragmatic ITSM
Forrester Research analyst Glenn O'Donnell and BlueStripe co-founder Vic Nyman discuss a breakthrough approach to application problem management. Learn the new approach for ITSM problem management, which provides: Rapid isolation of application slow-downs to specific components for quick problem resolution, 24/7 monitoring for proactive notification of potential issues before end users are impacted and much more.
Register for Webcast
Comments (2)
Update - GroundWork now has Auto-DiscoveryBy Anonymous on June 18, 2008, 12:56 pmGroundWork Monitor (even the free version) now does have automatic discovery of network resources. It has come a long way in the last year.
Reply | Read entire comment
Same old storyBy Anonymous on June 26, 2008, 11:34 amThese MSP and NetOP applications are over hyped, under functioning and massively over priced. It takes an enormous amount of time to deploy and rarely perform as...
Reply | Read entire comment
View all comments