* GroundWork provides open source net monitoring sans the techie Linux interface
Take a look at your “data center,” your server room – or the computers in the back of your office that are running your network. If they’re all running NetWare you can skip the rest of this newsletter, but if yours is like most organizations these days, you have a mix of operating systems powering your network – NetWare, Unix, Windows, Linux and maybe even more. How do you monitor them all?
Many large companies that have a fair number of servers running multiple operating systems look to sophisticated tools such as HP’s OpenView, IBM’s Tivoli, or CA’s Unicenter, but these tools can be overkill for small and midsize organizations.
There are some open source products, such as the Nagios service and network monitoring program, that are very popular with the Linux crowd. But their command line interface and the nearly infinite customization ability of the tools make them unattractive to network managers who are used to more graphical tools or those who simply want to log in and see what part of the IT infrastructure is not working right.
Does this describe your situation?
If so, there’s now a tool that can help. GroundWork has taken Nagios, prettied it up with a graphical front-end, added a MySQL database that contains monitoring profiles for popular open source programs and released the product as GroundWork Open Source, available for free download. GroundWork has even added clustering capabilities so that you can mirror your monitoring to maintain 24/7 uptime.
Still, if you need more there’s the GroundWork Professional version. This comes with full support, product maintenance and adds a library of pre-configured GroundWork Profiles for application and device monitoring, network performance monitoring, and an integrated console. It’s still going to cost a lot less then its better-known competitors since GroundWork Pro is licensed by monitoring server, not monitored devices.
You’ll need a Linux server to run it on, but do download the open source version and run it through its paces. Then check the feature comparison with the professional version to help you decide which is right for you. You’ll probably need it more for your Windows and ‘nix boxes, but even a NetWare server can have a rare problem from time to time – and it would be nice to know about it before the network suffers, wouldn’t it?
