GroundWork

「システム監視にオープンソースを活用すべし」と米Groundwork

Ali Mousavi — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:08:00 +0000

20カ国で2万台以上のシステム監視実績があるという、米Groundworkのマーケティング兼事業開発担当副社長が日本進出への意欲を表明した。

　オープンソースベースのシステム監視ソフトウェアを手掛ける米Groundworkが、日本市場での事業展開を強化する方針を明らかにした。同社マーケティング兼事業開発担当バイスプレジデントのデビッド・デニス氏は、「大手ベンダーで固められた年40億ドル規模の運用監視製品市場で、オープンソースによるブレークスルーを目指す」と語る。

　2004年創業のGroundworkは、ネットワーク監視のオープンソースソフトウェア（OSS）のNagiosなど複数のOSSを統合した運用管理製品「Groundwork Monitor」を手掛ける。金融、通信、公共・教育、テクノロジー業界を中心に、世界20カ国の2万台の機器監視に導入されている。

　デニス氏は、2008年の金融危機、また、仮想化やクラウドの普及が追い風となり、Groundwork Monitorのユーザーが2011年の1年間に40％増加したと話す。この市場ではIBMやHP、CA Technologiesなどが伝統的に強いが、各社の半分程度というコストメリットやクラウド環境に対応できる拡張性が人気という。

　特徴的なのがライセンス体系で、監視対象機器が50台以下なら無償利用できる。また50台より多い場合は、サポートを含め1台当たり年間4000～5000円のサブスクリプションモデルを設定。海外ではクラウド事業者経由によるサービスで、1時間当たり1セントというメニューも提供する。サーバやデータベース、ストレージ、ルータ、スイッチ、ファイアウォールなどの単体の機器からクラウド環境の統合監視にまで対応する。

　「最大ユーザーのVodafoneは8000台の機器をGroundwork Monitorで監視している。オープンソースを懸念する企業もあるが、実績をみれば信頼性に不安がないことを理解できるだろう」とデニス氏。ユーザーの80％は有償版を利用しているという。

　日本市場の事業はパートナー企業の、富士通ソーシアルサイエンスラボラトリやジー・ダブリュー・ティーが中心となって展開し、日本語版サイトでのトレーニングも提供。ユーザーコミュニティーもある。ジー・ダブリュー・ティー社長の坂本幸男氏は、「特に他業種に比べてサーバ仮想化の取り組みが緩やかだった金融機関からの引き合いが多い。Groundworkと共同でマーケティングとサポートを強化し、実績を重ねたい」と語る。

　「まずは無償版をダウンロードしてほしい。日本市場では2けたペースでユーザーを増やしたい」とデニス氏と述べている。

米Groundworkのデビッド・デニスマーケティング兼事業開発担当バイスプレジデント（左）とジー・ダブリュー・ティーの坂本幸男代表取締役社長

Source: itmedia.co.jp

オープンソースの運用監視ツールGroundWorkがDBをPostgreSQLに

Ali Mousavi — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:06:11 +0000

　オープンソースソフトで構成する運用監視ツール「GroundWork」を提供する米GroundWork社のマーケティング担当副社長 David Dennis氏（写真1）は2012年4月3日、製品の新版や販売状況を明らかにした。

　同氏によると、日本国内では富士通とGWTが販売代理店となり、金融関連会社やISP（インターネットサービスプロバイダー）など8社が導入済みだという。欧米では約200社に導入実績がある。各社がGroundWorkを採用する主な理由は「技術面とコスト面の両面」（Dennis氏）。GroundWorkは、年間利用料を支払うサブスクリプションモデルで提供しており初期コストが大幅に下がる。加えて、運用コストにおいても「商用ソフトの50％程度」（同氏）と述べる。

　技術面では、オープンソースの監視ソフトとして最も著名な「Nagios」を中核に、各種ツールを統合している点が特徴だ。例えば、GUIで監視するソフトも各種備えており、大規模システムも視覚的に管理しやすい（写真2）。各種ツールや機能の統合には、オープンソースのアプリケーションサーバーの「JBoss」を使っている。

　今年2月に提供開始した新版6.6では、データ管理用のデータベース管理システムを、MySQLからPostgreSQLに変更した。理由は、MySQLが米Oracle社に買収されたことで使用条件が変わったため。Dennis氏によれば、多くのベンダーがPostgreSQLに乗り換えているという。

　日本の市場にも力は入れていくが、日本語版の要望はまだないため、情報の提供にとどめている。日本語のページを作成しており、質問を受け付ける。「日本語対応は容易なので、ニーズがあれば対応する」（同氏）という。

Source: itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp

Meet The GroundWork Team at Campus Technology Forum 2012

Ali Mousavi — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 22:48:54 +0000

The GroundWork Team will be at Campus Technology Forum 2012 on April 30th — May 2nd in Long Beach, California.

If you are attending and would like to meet with us to discuss your project, please fill out this form.

GroundWork Releases Campus Program for Educational Institutions

Ali Mousavi — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 07:00:54 +0000

GroundWork offers up to 90% discount to colleges and universities for IT infrastructure management

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – March 28, 2012 – GroundWork Inc., (www.gwos.com) the leading open platform for network, application and cloud monitoring, announced today the release of the GroundWork Campus Program, offering education institutions the opportunity to purchase GroundWork Monitor Enterprise at a savings of up to 90 percent.

“University IT environments are as large, complex and demanding as conventional corporate IT environments, yet have fewer resources—money, staff and time—to deal with those environments,” David Dennis, VP of Marketing and Business Development. “The GroundWork Campus Program is making it easier for universities to coordinate campus wide monitoring efforts while maintaining economies.”
GroundWork Monitor is already being used by many colleges and universities, including University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC), University of New Mexico, Duke University, University of Wyoming, and many others.
The GroundWork Campus Program includes the full version of GroundWork’s GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, a real-time availability and performance monitoring system. It tracks and records availability gives you rapid problem notification, and presents trending data and reports for your entire IT infrastructure, using an enterprise class portal with customizable dashboards.
To learn more about the GroundWork Campus Program, see: http://www.gwos.com/promotions/campus/

GroundWork will also be exhibiting at the upcoming Campus Technology Forum in Long Beach, on April 30-May 2, 2012. Come visit our booth, number 5.

http://events.campustechnology.com/events/ct-forum-conference/information/exhibitors.aspx

About Groundwork

GroundWork (www.groundworkopensource.com) is the leading open platform for systems and network management software, delivering enterprise-class network, system, application, and cloud monitoring solu-tions at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions.

GroundWork’s approach gives customers the flexibility to use diverse open source and proprietary tech-nologies together under a unified web services portal, allowing users to leverage the advantages of open source while simultaneously preserving existing investments in legacy management tools.

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition powers organizations in more than 50 countries, like Alexza Phar-maceuticals, Crocs, National Australia Bank, Siemens, Travel Click and World Bank.

Media Contact:
Ali Mousavi
GroundWork
415-992-4590
amousavi@gwos.com

GroundWork Seeks to Grow MSP Relationships

Ali Mousavi — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:20:44 +0000

MSPmentor — Earlier this week, GroundWork Inc., the monitoring software developer, released GroundWork Monitor Core — a free version of its GroundWork Monitoring Enterprise version. The release was really two moves in one for GroundWork — which wants to more effectively target the SMB market and managed services providers (MSPs).

GroundWork has quietly repositioned itself over the past year or two. During the company’s early years, GroundWork promoted its open source focus. More recently, GroundWork has said less about open source and more about business value.

GroundWork VP of Marketing and Business Development David Dennis explains the company’s current market positioning. “GroundWork is an open platform with a lot open source features,” Dennis said. “From a licensing point of view, GroundWork is not an open source. We don’t use a GPL (General Public License). We pull everything into an interface so it can be fully integrated with other products.”

“The fear for many is that, if they build something on open source, they don’t know what their obligations are to share code with other people. They may have developed something that they don’t want to share,” explained Dennis, who maintains that this risk is not such a big deal for MSPs. “Ironically, the fears are less likely for MSPs,” he continued. “The risk is more likely for technology providers that are actually writing software. MSPs are not likely writing a lot of code.”

Dennis said GroundWork has steadily added MSP customers because it steadily adds new features and develops pricing models that attract MSPs. Features like multi-tenancy, server monitoring, and more have all helped to attract MSPs.
Still, GroundWork hasn’t disclosed its MSP installed base. And no single vertical market accounts for more than 15 percent of the company’s revenue — so it’s safe to say MSPs are a niche installed base for GroundWork.

GroundWork is taking multiple steps to grow that niche. “We’re going to continue to enhance our hypervisor and cloud support for MSPs and others,” Dennis said. “In the next couple of months, we will have enhanced our KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) support and enhanced our VMware vCloud support.”

Read the full article here.

GroundWork Monitor Core: Free Network, App, Cloud Monitoring

Ali Mousavi — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:16:07 +0000

MSPmentor — GroundWork Inc., which develops monitoring software, has released a free version of its platform called GroundWork Monitor Core. It’s a move that GroundWork CEO and Co-Founder Dave Lilly says that the company has long been planning.

Before diving in to GroundWork Monitor Core, a little background. GroundWork’s original solution is called GroundWork Monitor Enterprise. It’s a real-time availability and performance monitoring system that gives users customizable dashboards to see data trends and reports. It can also track and record network availability, identify problems and notify IT administrators. And if you can’t guess by it’s name, the IT monitoring solution is tailored to enterprise businesses.

GroundWork Monitor Core comes with all of the IT monitoring features included in GroundWork Monitor Enterprise. The catch? Core lets businesses monitor a maximum of 50 network devices, whereas the enterprise version comes with a no-limit license. It seems as though GroundWork is making a pitch to the SMB market, as the company says its Core version is “ideal for small environments.” Time will tell whether the SMB market agrees.

This isn’t the first time GroundWork has released a free version of one of its products. In August 2011, GroundWork released a free monitoring platform called GroundWork Monitor NPO for non-profit organizations and open source projects.

GroundWork is an interesting one to keep an eye on. It’s one of many companies trying to prove that there is room for an open source platform within a managed services strategy. GroundWork debuted a website and software pricing specifically for MSPs back in September 2010. Most recently, GroundWork added the Chicago-based MSP MKAdvantage to its MSP customer portfolio. We’ll be catching up with GroundWork brass this week to get an update on the company’s progress in the MSP market.

Read the full article here.

GroundWork Announces GroundWork Monitor Core

Ali Mousavi — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:00:57 +0000

New GroundWork Monitor Core free for a maximum of 50 monitored devices

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — January 18, 2012 — GroundWork Inc., (www.groundworkopensource.com) the leading open platform for network, application and cloud monitoring, announced today that it has released GroundWork Monitor Core. A free, feature-identical version of GroundWork’s flagship product GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, Core offers a maximum of 50 monitored devices and community based support.

“For some time, GroundWork has wanted to release a free version of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise,” said Dave Lilly, CEO and co-founder of GroundWork. “We feel that Core is an important way to contribute to the open source community, in addition to our other contributions.”

GroundWork Monitor Core provides all the same product features as GroundWork Monitor Enterprise. The new Core version is ideal for small environments.

GroundWork Monitor Core includes:

A Copy of the Newly Released GroundWork Monitor 6.6
License to monitor up to 50 devices
Community-based support
New Postgres database backend, for improved performance

To learn more about GroundWork Monitor Core and its features visit: www.gwos.com/downloads/overview

About Groundwork

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition powers organizations in more than 50 countries, like Alexza Phar-maceuticals, Crocs, National Australia Bank, Siemens, Travel Click and World Bank.

Media Contact:
Ali Mousavi
GroundWork
415-992-4590
amousavi@gwos.com

GroundWork Monitor Core Launch Q&A

David Dennis — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:49:00 +0000

Today, GroundWork released GroundWork Monitor Core, a FREE, feature-identical version of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise. Providing all the same product features as our flagship GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, a license to monitor up to 50 devices and community-based support.

We have prepared answers to some of the questions that you may have about this announcement.

Q. Why is GroundWork releasing GroundWork Monitor Core and why now?
The GroundWork Monitor Core release is one important way to contribute back to the open source community, in addition to the code contributions GroundWork makes to some of the projects included within the GroundWork platform, and the licenses that GroundWork provides to charitable non-profit organizations and universities.

One of the major benefits of GroundWork Enterprise is the tight integration of the open source modules and the unified installer, which include the product’s databases. Since GroundWork Monitor version 6.6 all of the databases have been replaced by PostgresSQL, making a free offering now possible.

Q. What is the fate of GroundWork Monitor Quickstart?
Since GroundWork Monitor Core has the same product features and license limitations as Quickstart, there is no longer any need for Quickstart. GroundWork will thus be discontinuing the Quickstart offering.

Q. If I have a current copy of Quickstart, what is my path forward?
Existing Quickstart users can transition to GroundWork Monitor Core at no charge. If you wish to migrate your data, you will need to target version 6.6.1 or later for the upgrade.

Q. How does the release of GroundWork Monitor Core impact the GroundWork Monitor NPO (non-profit) program?

With the launch of GroundWork Monitor Core, non-profit organizations with fewer then 50 devices will no longer need to apply for an NPO license in order to get free software.

Qualifying charitable organizations with more than 50 monitored devices are encouraged to apply for the NPO program, as before.

Q. What does the launch of GroundWork Monitor Core mean for GroundWork Monitor Community Edition?
GroundWork’s user data indicates that the majority of GroundWork Monitor Community Edition installations are for less than 50 devices. For these users, GroundWork Monitor Core provides a compelling upgrade when compared to GroundWork Monitor Community Edition. Core offers a wide range of new features and bug fixes that were not incorporated into Community Edition.

Unlike the Community Edition, the Core license is limited to one per customer, but with that exception, we expect that the vast majority of our Community Edition users will download and try Core; we think they’ll be pleased with all the features and performance improvements we’ve added since the last release of Community Edition.

What’s New in GroundWork Monitor 6.5

Nate Bennett — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 23:04:06 +0000

Join Hans Kriel – Solution Architect and Roge Ruttimann – VP or Engineering and Quality as they demo the new features and functionality of GroundWork Monitor 6.5.

Get the webcast slides here

GroundWork and SIOS: Adding High Availability

Nate Bennett — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:35:11 +0000

GroundWork Expands Network Management and Application Monitoring with GroundWork Monitor 6.5

Ali Mousavi — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:00:33 +0000

New release includes integrations for ntop, NeDi, and Network Weathermap, enhanced Java and Windows monitoring, increased NOC functionality

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — September 30, 2011 — GroundWork Inc., (www.gwos.com) the open platform for network, application and cloud monitoring, today announced general availability of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.5. The latest release of GroundWork Monitor provides:

Expanded network management with pre-built integrations for network traffic analysis (ntop), network discovery (NeDi) and network visualization (Network Weathermap). These integrations are available to all GroundWork Monitor 6.5 users at no additional charge, although they do require downloading additional packages, located here.
Improved JMX and Java application monitoring via GroundWork’s Java Distributed Monitoring Agent (JDMA), which now includes a wizard to make configuration and deployment quicker and easier.
Enhanced Windows application and OS monitoring using GroundWork Distributed Monitoring Agents (GDMA), which have been updated with the latest version of WMI scripts, version 1.4. GroundWork Distributed Monitoring Agents and Java Distributed Monitoring Agents are also both available to all GroundWork Monitor 6.5 users at no additional charge.
New Event Console UI, with improved display, search and categorization, allowing for tighter integration into NOC operations.

“GroundWork Monitor 6.5 expands GroundWork’s commitment to a full enterprise-class system, application, and network monitoring platform for a simple, easy to understand price,” said David Dennis, VP of Marketing, GroundWork. “With a GroundWork Monitor Enterprise subscription, you don’t pay extra for agents, plugins, adapters, extra management servers, or additional functionality – it’s all included.”

Full GroundWork Monitor 6.5 Release Notes can be found here.

About Groundwork

GroundWork (http://www.gwos.com) is the leading open platform for network, application, and cloud monitoring, for companies with heterogeneous operating systems, application and hardware environments who want to reduce ongoing monitoring costs, consolidate views and improve staff productivity.

GroundWork’s approach gives customers the flexibility to use diverse open source and proprietary technologies together under a unified web services-based portal, allowing users to leverage the advantages of open source while simultaneously preserving existing investments in legacy management tools.

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise powers organizations in more than 50 countries, like Alexza Pharmaceuticals, Crocs, National Australia Bank, Siemens, Travel Click and World Bank. GroundWork Monitor Enterprise is available to monitor any environment starting at $49 USD per year.

Media Contact:
Ali Mousavi
amousavi@gwos.com

Windows Monitoring with GDMA

Thomas Stocking — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:12:37 +0000

This tutorial shows how to deploy Windows GDMA and the Auto Configure Feature.

Getting Started With SNMP

Thomas Stocking — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:52:28 +0000

Many, many, systems support SNMP, which is a treasure trove of monitoring data. This section will open the door to making your monitoring rich with data.

Getting Started With SSH

Thomas Stocking — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:49:14 +0000

Monitoring with SSH has advantages in security and flexibility that you can leverage with GroundWork. This section helps you get SSH parameters setup to do this efficiantly. Check out the settings to make modern SSH versions speedier when using this method.

Getting Started With WMI

Thomas Stocking — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:43:01 +0000

Need to monitor Windows Systems? Here is a quick tutorial section that will get you going with valuable monitoring quickly.

Getting Started With Custom Graphs

Thomas Stocking — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:39:22 +0000

In this section, we walk through the creation of custom graphs using the tools available in GroundWork for automatically making great-looking and informative performance graphs.

Getting Started With fping

Thomas Stocking — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:35:26 +0000

In this section of the Getting Started with GroundWork free training, we introduce the fping feeder, which can greatly increase the efficiency of ping monitoring with GroundWork Monitor.

System Planning Guide for GroundWork Monitor 6.5

Nate Bennett — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 12:00:52 +0000

This is the officially supported guideline for deciding how to implement and scale your GroundWork system. It provides the information on reasonable limits and recommended specifications you will need when planning your system.

Getting Started with GroundWork Training Section 3 – Discovery

Thomas Stocking — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:57:57 +0000

This section of the Getting Started with GroundWork free training covers the use of the Auto-discovery tool. This will get you up and running with meaningful monitoring in minimal time!

Getting Started with GroundWork Training Section 2 – Install

Thomas Stocking — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:55:27 +0000

In this second section of the free Getting Started with GroundWork training, you will go over the installation of the GroundWork monitor software on a supported Linux system. If you are the kind of person who likes to know the options and details of what they install, this is a quick and easy way to learn from the experts about GroundWork installs.

Getting Started with GroundWork Training Section 1 – Prepare

Thomas Stocking — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:51:38 +0000

In this first section of the free Getting Started with GroundWork training, you will go over preparation steps to ensure success of your monitoring project. This quick review of best practices is well worth the time. Don’t skip these steps!

Upcoming Webcast: GroundWork and SIOS – Adding High Availability to Your GroundWork Monitor Installation

Nate Bennett — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 23:47:45 +0000

GroundWork has partnered with SIOS to include their SteelEye technology with GroundWork Monitor Enterprise standby servers, helping to improve its high availability capabilities.

Join GroundWork’s Kevin Stone and SIOS’s Tony Tomarchio as they cover how the SteelEye Protection Suite:

Integrates with GroundWork monitoring and alerting
Adds high availability to your GroundWork monitoring system
Improves your disaster recovery capabilities

The webcast will take place on October 6th at 10am PST

To register, Click Here

GroundWork launches free enterprise monitoring tool for NPO, open source projects

Ali Mousavi — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 19:27:50 +0000

CBR — Full version of GroundWork Monitor NPO available for qualifying organisations

GroundWork has released its GroundWork Monitor NPO for non-profit organisations and open source projects.

GroundWork is an open platform for network, application and cloud management.

Offering the full version of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, NPO is available for qualifying organisations that would otherwise not be able to afford enterprise-class monitoring offerings said GroundWork. — CBR Staff Writer

Read the full article here.

Kostenlose Groundwork-Lizenz für Open-Source-Projekte und NPO

Ali Mousavi — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:26:18 +0000

LINUX-MAGAZINE ONLINE — Der Softwarehersteller Groundwork bietet seine Monitoring-Lösung mit einer kostenlosen Lizenz für Non-Profit-Organisationen (NPO) und Open-Source-Projekte an.

Groundwork Monitor baut auf freien Komponenten wie Nagios, Cacti und MySQL auf, ist aber selbst proprietär lizenziert. Die kostenlose Lizenz für freie Softwareprojekte versteht der Hersteller daher als Dankeschön an die Open-Source-Community. Softwareprojekte und NPOs müssen sich bei Groundwork bewerben, um die Vollversion von Groundwork Monitor Enterprise zu erhalten. — Mathias Huber

Read the full article here.

GroundWork Launches Free Monitoring Software for Non-Profits

Ali Mousavi — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:19:09 +0000

MSPMENTOR — GroundWork Inc. has launched a free monitoring platform that targets network, application and cloud management. But there’s a catch: The free offering, called GroundWork Monitor NPO, is for non-profit organizations and open source projects. There’s also a side story here. GroundWork is striving to help customers use open source and proprietary management tools in tandem. Here’s a closer look at the strategy. — Joe Panettieri

Read the full article here.

GroundWork Announces GroundWork Monitor NPO

David Dennis — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:00:54 +0000

Free Enterprise-class Monitoring Solution for Non-Profit Organizations and Open Source Projects

SAN FRANCISCO – August 17, 2011 - GroundWork Inc., (www.gwos.com) the leading open platform for network, application, and cloud monitoring, cloud management, released today GroundWork Monitor NPO for non-profit organizations and open source projects. Offering the full version of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, NPO is available for qualifying organizations that would otherwise not be able to afford enterprise-class monitoring solutions.

“There are a number of great organizations that are making a difference in this world, that need all the features of an enterprise monitoring technology, but just can’t afford it,” said Dave Lilly, CEO and co-founder of GroundWork. “Our goal is to not only provide these organizations with free access to GroundWork’s software, but give back to the open source project community that has helped build GroundWork into the world-class enterprise monitoring product it is today.”

GroundWork Monitor NPO is free for use by qualifying non-profit organizations, charities and open source projects who meeting the following criteria and are approved by GroundWork:

Non-Profit Criteria:

Non-profit
Non-government
Non-academic
Non-commercial
Non-political
Secular

Open Source Project Criteria:

Established code base
Publicly available project website
Using an approved open source license

To apply, go to: http://www.gwos.com/pricing/nonprofit-offering/

About GroundWork

GroundWork (http://www.gwos.com) is the leading open platform for systems and network management software, delivering enterprise-class network, system, application, and cloud monitoring solutions at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions.

GroundWork’s approach gives customers the flexibility to use diverse open source and proprietary technologies together under a unified web services portal, allowing users to leverage the advantages of open source while simultaneously preserving existing investments in legacy management tools.

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition powers organizations in more than 50 countries, like Alexza Pharmaceuticals, Crocs, National Australia Bank, Siemens, Travel Click and World Bank. GroundWork Monitor Enterprise is available to monitor any environment starting at $49 USD per year.

How To Use Linux To Help Customers Go to Market Faster

jesseesch — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 18:59:11 +0000

CRN — Creating, building and distributing software applications is a complicated and labor-intensive proposition. Because time is money, IT solution providers and ISVs can simplify the process. SUSE’s senior marketing manager explains how Linux can be a critical part of your customer’s go-to-market strategy. — Jennifer Bosavage

Read the full article here.

GroundWork’s New Office

Nate Bennett — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:26:21 +0000

GroundWork has called Townsend Street in San Francisco home for over 4 years, and it has been a great area of the city to work. Yet, with the need for a larger office space, we have relocated to the heart of the SOMA district. Although we are sad to say goodbye to being neighbors of Giant’s Stadium and our favorite office lunch spots, we are looking forward to settling in and exploring our new neighborhood.

Our new address is 631 Howard St, Suite 320, San Francisco Ca, 94105.

GroundWork Joins Open Virtualization Alliance, Extends Open Platform and Virtualization Strategy

Nate Bennett — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 20:16:33 +0000

GroundWork has joined 64 other companies, as part of the Open Virtualization Alliance, which aims to foster the adoption of open virtualization technologies by providing education, best practices and technical advice to businesses.

We are excited about the potential of this alliance and how it plays into our open platform and virtualization strategies, with the hopes that businesses will become more aware of how they can benefit from adopting such technologies.

Read the press release here.

GroundWork Joins Open Virtualization Alliance

Nate Bennett — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:00:21 +0000

Fast-growing industry consortium promoting the KVM ecosystem and educating the market

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies, including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), today announced broad industry support and adoption with the addition of 65 new members to the consortium. With this, the consortium has achieved nearly ten-fold growth in membership since its establishment just one month ago, and today includes members across a wide spectrum of hardware, software, services and cloud computing businesses.

Read full press release here.

GroundWork Expands Open Platform Strategy with New Solution Partner, MKAdvantage

David Dennis — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 06:00:08 +0000

Chicago-based MKAdvantage brings deep IT service management background and unique customization capabilities to DevOps market

SAN FRANCISCO – May 12, 2011 - GroundWork Inc., (www.gwos.com) the leading open platform for network, application, and cloud monitoring, announced today that it has partnered with MKAdvantage to resell, deploy and build solutions around GroundWork Monitor Enterprise.

“The market demand for an open platform for IT monitoring and management continues to grow, with an increasing need to coordinate, visualize, and project information collected from diverse IT operations and application development tools into a single integrated and actionable service management view,” said Dave Lilly, CEO and co-founder of GroundWork. “We’re very impressed with MKAdvantage’s experience in enterprise IT service management, as well as their ability to customize and extend GroundWork Monitor Enterprise into specialized vertical markets. Their combination of IT operations and development capabilities is a perfect fit for our open platform and the future of the enterprise IT management market as a whole.”

Founded in Chicago in 2006, MKAdvantage provides end-to-end OSS management and IT service management solutions to telecommunications service providers (RBOC’s and CLEC’s), managed service providers and enterprises including several global financial services organizations.

“We are pleased to be partnered with GroundWork and are impressed with the enterprise-class features, platform extensibility and competitive pricing that GroundWork Monitor provides,” said Chris Schaft, President, MKAdvantage. “We’re already delivering several significant value added extensions to the GroundWork platform that are specifically tailored to our target customers. This includes those aimed at customers in the telecommunications space with the need to monitor TL1 enabled devices, and for the enterprise we are expanding the SNMP event and KPI monitoring capabilities.”

About GroundWork

About MKAdvantage

MKAdvantage (http://www.mkadvantage.com) was founded in Chicago, IL in 2006. Our focus is to enable our customers to gain maximum advantage from their ITSM/ITIL related investments in support of serving their customers and delivering on theircorporate missions. MKAdvantage is a privately held, 100 percent US Army Veteran owned business with a powerful ethos of investment optimization and customer satisfaction. Our early customers included CBEYOND, US Cellular, and SAVVIS. We have since expanded our reach and offerings into the enterprise, delivering mission critical services to companies such as Nationwide, Graybar Electric, and Wells Fargo.

Setting Up Application Server Monitoring in GroundWork

Thomas Stocking — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:29:51 +0000

This 12 minute video goes into detailed description of the steps needed to install the Java Discovery and Monitoring Agent on a JBOSS server (a GroundWork server) as an example.

Use this process to get started monitoring your Java applications with GroundWork.

Introduction to Java Application Monitoring

Thomas Stocking — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:15:25 +0000

This is a short (5 minute) introduction to monitoring Java applications with GroundWork. If you need to understand the concepts and methods we use, watch this video! If you are looking for a quick way to get started using the JDMA, watch “Setting Up Application Server Monitoring in GroundWork”.

GroundWork Adds GroundWork Cloud Connector to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.4

David Dennis — Thu, 12 May 2011 06:00:57 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO – May 12, 2011 - GroundWork Inc., (www.gwos.com) the leading open platform for
network, application, and cloud monitoring, announced today that it has released GroundWork Cloud Connector for GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.4. An automatic, monitoring provisioning system, GroundWork Cloud Connector gives users the ability to monitor Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus cloud instances right along side traditional data center infrastructures.

Short video introduction and how download of GroundWork Cloud Connector: http://www.gwos.com/2011/groundwork-cloud-connector/

“As cloud computing slowly matures, it is essential to manage the transition of your infrastructures and data, and monitor it from a vendor neutral point of view,” said Thomas Stocking, CTO and co-founder of GroundWork. “GroundWork gives you the tools to set up monitoring the cloud just like you would with your internal infrastructure.”

GroundWork Cloud Connector features auto-configuration and profile assignment, so as cloud-based machines appear and vanish in your virtual infrastructure, the Cloud Connector updates your monitoring system to cover them. It is available at no additional cost to existing GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Flex subscribers at: https://kb.gwos.com/display/FLEX/GroundWork+Cloud+Connector

GroundWork Cloud Connector features include:

Host Profiles: Create host profiles to monitor each type of instance you deploy. Cloud Connector periodically checks the cloud for new instances and applies the right host profiles automatically.
Alerting: If a host profile becomes unavailable, Cloud Connector will alert your staff when the instances become unavailable or performance falls below the set thresholds.
Availability Reports: Keeps track of the cloud providers availability and performance, helping you
manage relationships with vendors and verify compliance with published SLA’s.
Synchronization of all monitored clouds: Runs a synchronization script periodically that updates your monitoring system with the current status and configuration of all monitored clouds — this includes monitoring multiple Eucalyptus and Amazon EC2 clouds. In addition to automatically updating host and host groups.

For more information about additional features in GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.4 visit: http://www.gwos.com/products/whats-new/

About GroundWork

GroundWork (http://www.gwos.com) is the leading open platform for systems and network management
software, delivering enterprise-class network, system, application, and cloud monitoring solutions at a
fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions.

GroundWork’s approach gives customers the flexibility to use diverse open source and proprietary
technologies together under a unified web services portal, allowing users to leverage the advantages of
open source while simultaneously preserving existing investments in legacy management tools.

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition powers organizations in more than 50 countries, like Alexza
Pharmaceuticals, Crocs, National Australia Bank, Siemens, Travel Click and World Bank. GroundWork
Monitor Enterprise is available to monitor any environment starting at $49 USD per year.

GroundWork Cloud Connector

Thomas Stocking — Mon, 02 May 2011 22:33:52 +0000

This is a video introduction to the GroundWork Cloud Connector, a useful add-on for monitoring EC2 and Eucalyptus cloud instances. It features auto-configuration and automatic profile assignment. This video walks you through the download and setup for EC2 instance monitoring.

GroundWork Is Hiring!

Nate Bennett — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 18:04:59 +0000

GroundWork is looking for a Support Engineer to join the team! Qualifications Include:

Familiarity with at least one of the following Open Source Tools: Cacti, Nagios(R), Nagios(R) plugins, RRDTool, SNMPTT, Syslog-NG, MySQL
Must be proficient in at least one scripting language.
Familiarity with java, perl, c, and php are a plus.
Familiarity with JBOSS and the JBOSS portal are a big plus.
Prior experience in support and familiarity with support processes a plus.
Good written and oral communication skills a must. In particular the candidate must be able to be clearly understood in conversations with native speakers of American English in telephone conversations.

See the entire job posting here.

Windows Monitoring with WMI and Powershell

Thomas Stocking — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 22:41:06 +0000

In this 15 minute video, we introduce monitoring with WMI and Powershell, both powerful methods of getting data from MS Windows systems. We will tell you how these are used with GroundWork, and compare several approaches.
Ever see a perfmon counter and want to make it into a GroundWork service check? This video will walk you through an example. We also supply a sample powershell plugin, and the slides we used to create this video.

You can download the slides used to make this video here: WMI_PS_slides
You can download the example powershell plugin used in the video here: getContextSwtiches.ps1.zip

Cacti Integration

jesseesch — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 19:54:44 +0000

This tutorial screencast describes the GroundWork Monitor integration with Cacti, and shows you the basics of its configuration. After watching this, you will have all the information you need to set up the Cacti graphs in the GroundWork status views, and to generate alerts based on thresholds you set.

What’s New in GroundWork Monitor 6.4

Nate Bennett — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 21:17:03 +0000

Learn about the new features and functionality of GroundWork Monitor 6.4 including integration of maps and diagrams into role-based views, Windows monitoring agent support for 64-bit Windows, Linux child server spooling, security improvements and over 100 additional bug-fixes.

“What’s New in GroundWork Monitor 6.4″ Webcast

Nate Bennett — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 19:49:24 +0000

GroundWork Monitor 6.4 has been released and we’re excited to show you the new enhancements and features. Join us for this live demonstration of release 6.4. This webcast was be recorded in case you couldn’t make it.

Watch it Now

Intro to Agent Based Monitoring

Nate Bennett — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:02:25 +0000

The GDMA is a multi-platform, lightweight agent, with central configuration from the GroundWork parent server. In a sense it is the ultimate in distributed monitoring, making the target system execute the data gathering, and report the results back to the GroundWork parent.

In this video Joe Godsil, GroundWork’s Lead Sales Engineer, discusses details of the GDMA and distributed monitoring within GroundWork Monitor.

Building Dashboards in Groundwork Monitor

Nate Bennett — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:54:49 +0000

GroundWork Monitor allows users to customize dashboards, putting the information about your environment you consider most important into one consolidated view. Joe Godsil, GroundWork’s Lead Sales Engineer, will show how to this customization can be done to suit your organizations needs via a live GroundWork Monitor instance.

Installing GroundWork Monitor

Nate Bennett — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:16:47 +0000

GroundWork’s Lead Sales Engineer, Joe Godsil, takes you step by step through the initial installation of GroundWork Monitor.

Justifying Your Investment In Open Source Monitoring

Nate Bennett — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:40:16 +0000

Justifying the cost and organizational impact of an open source monitoring project isn’t a lot different than any other project. The gains and losses are quantified for the life cycle of the proposed system and compared to those of a set of alternatives including the “do-nothing” alternative. Then the risks associated with deployment success are evaluated. The decision selected has the best return on staff time and available funding within an acceptable level of risk.

In this webcast, GroundWork Co-Founder, Dave Lilly, reviews the standard methods for justifying monitoring software projects while distinguishing unique open source and commercial open source alternatives processes and elements. If you are considering a new monitoring project in the next 3 months, this webcast will give you the tools you need to present the business case to other decision makers.

GroundWork and WebInject

jesseesch — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 17:08:39 +0000

Discover best practices for monitoring web applications using Groundwork Monitor in this 22 minute video demonstration. In it Simon Bennett, Sr. Director of Product Management at Groundwork, shows how GroundWork monitors a consumer web application using multi-step transaction tests. These tests use the widely-adopted WebInject project to provide a simple test specification mechanism. GroundWork also extends this approach to include SOAP interfaces to create a 3-tier application performance dashboard. This enables managers and operations staff to see the overall health of their application tiers without requiring deep instrumentation of every application component.

GroundWork Expands Neustar Webmetrics Partnership

David Dennis — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:22:22 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO – Feb. 15, 2011 - GroundWork Inc., (www.gwos.com) the leading open platform for
network, application, and cloud monitoring, announced today that it has expanded its partnership with
Neustar (NYSE: NSR), a company that enables trusted communication across networks, applications and
enterprises around the world.

Working together, GroundWork and Neustar answer the critical questions for today’s online businesses:

Is my IT infrastructure performing at peak efficiency?
What’s the real online experience my customers are having with my brand?
Are my SaaS-based partners living up to service level agreements?

The integration of Webmetrics into GroundWork Monitor Enterprise gives GroundWork users the ability to
compare side-by-side dashboards for both internal and external monitoring needs.

Neustar Webmetrics allows you to:

Externally monitor sites and applications to provide a “true view” of the end user’s experience
Receive alerts when issues arise, so problems can be solved before customers are impacted
View trending data and analysis via a real-time dashboard

“For GroundWork Monitor users that rely upon their websites to do business, it is important to have
both external and internal monitoring perspectives under one roof,” said David Dennis, vice president of
Marketing & Business Development at GroundWork. “When you combine Neustar Webmetrics with the
MSP features of GroundWork Monitor and the new cloud features of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise
Cloud, users that are working in industries such as e-commerce, media and online gaming can now
monitor these complex end user-facing data centers.”

“The market for online performance monitoring is exploding,” said Sophie Shiatis, vice president of
marketing at Neustar Webmetrics. “Neustar is excited to bring end-user perspective monitoring to the
GroundWork customers and prospects. The combination of network monitoring and external monitoring is extremely valuable in providing a holistic view of performance.”

Today, GroundWork has over 10,000 installations of GroundWork Monitor. In addition, the GroundWork
platform incorporates Nagios®, the most widely deployed open source monitoring platform in the world.

About GroundWork

GroundWork (http://www.gwos.com) is the leading open platform for systems and network management
software, delivering enterprise-class network, system, application, and cloud monitoring solutions at a
fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions.

GroundWork’s approach gives customers the flexibility to use diverse open source and proprietary
technologies together under a unified web services portal, allowing users to leverage the advantages of
open source while simultaneously preserving existing investments in legacy management tools.

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition powers organizations in more than 50 countries, like Alexza
Pharmaceuticals, Crocs, National Australia Bank, Siemens, Travel Click and World Bank. GroundWork
Monitor Enterprise is available to monitor any environment starting at $49 USD per year.

About Neustar and Neustar Webmetrics Services

Neustar, Inc. (NYSE: NSR) provides market-leading, innovative services that enable trusted
communication across networks, applications, and enterprises around the world. Webmetrics is a Neustar
service that provides collaborative performance management services for complex web ecosystems.
Neustar Webmetrics website testing and monitoring services are used by companies to ensure online
performance, competitive advantage, and a positive end-user experience. Visit www.neustar.biz and
www.webmetrics.com for more information.

Nagios® Migration

Ali Mousavi — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:08:20 +0000

Are you currently using Nagios®, but would like to expand its features and capabilities? This webcast describes how you can migrate from Nagios® to GroundWork monitor with confidence, relying on GroundWork’s enterprise-proven technology. You will see how easy it is to migrate, and learn about the advantages of implementing Nagios® through GroundWork Monitor.

GroundWork Releases Enterprise 6.3

David Dennis — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 23:56:47 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (GWOS http://www.gwos.com), the leader in commercial open source systems and network management software, today announced general availability of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.3. The latest release of GWOS’ flagship product GroundWork Monitor provides new capabilities for customers running complex infrastructure who need to visualize their IT operations and performance from a business perspective.

This release enables customers to create customized views of their processes and infrastructure that reflect the current health and performance of the whole environment. By visualizing key business operations in this way IT staff can efficiently keep customers and executives up-to-date on day-to-day operations. This capability, previously developed by GWOS partner Super-Visions BVBA (http://www.super-visions.com) and based on the NagVis open source project has been deployed by IT organizations in many countries to diagnose performance bottlenecks before they impact business operations.

“We have been successful in helping many companies realize their goal of linking IT operations to business objectives through clear diagrams and visualization as well as offering operational teams immediate root-cause analysis functionality,” says Maarten Loose, partner at Super-visions. “By including these features now by default in GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Release 6.3, this benefit is accessible to all GWOS subscribers around the globe.”

In addition, Release 6.3 includes enhanced capabilities for monitoring large-scale networks through the inclusion of the Cacti network data collection project. “This change complements the existing data collection mechanisms already included in GWOS Monitor and enables customers to effectively monitor their entire IT infrastructure from server, network, application and user perspectives with a single solution,” said Simon Bennett, Sr. Director of Product Management for GWOS. “This release continues our commitment to adding additional product features for our Flex subscription at no additional cost.”

Features in GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.3 include:

Audible alarms for events provides operators with a second communication channel so they can effectively multi-task when triaging and diagnosing alarms.
New dashboard options including new filtering options for customizing views.
Improved Java support for monitoring applications using the Oracle Weblogic 10 environment.

Webcast:

GWOS will be hosting a Webcast demonstrating the new features of GroundWork Monitor 6.3 on October 11th, 2010 at 9am PT/ Noon ET. To register for this Webcast please visit: http://www.gwos.com/resources/webcasts/6.3.html

To learn more about what’s new in GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.3 please visit: http://www.gwos.com/products/whats-new-6.3.html

About GroundWork Open Source (GWOS)

San Francisco-based GWOS (http://www.gwos.com) is the market leader in commercial open source network and systems management software, delivering enterprise-class network, system and application management solutions at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions.

GWOS’s best of breed approach gives customers the flexibility to use diverse open source and proprietary technologies together under a unified interface, allowing users to leverage the advantages of open source while simultaneously preserving existing investments in legacy management tools.

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition powers organizations like Alexza Pharmaceuticals, Crocs, National Australia Bank, Siemens, Travel Click and World Bank. GroundWork Monitor Enterprise is available to monitor any environment up to 100 devices starting at $49 USD per year.

GroundWork Launches Quickstart for Enterprise 6.3

David Dennis — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 23:50:20 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (GWOS http://www.gwos.com), the leader in commercial open source systems and network management software, Enterprise Quickstart version of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.3, offering all the features of 6.3 to small environments for only $49.

“Enterprise Quickstart is the perfect option for small organizations that do not have a substantial budget for monitoring, but would like to utilized an enterprise level solution,” said Simon Bennett, Sr. Director of Product Management for GWOS.

Enterprise Quickstart Summary

For environments with up to 50 devices, Enterprise Quickstart offers all of the following at a flat rate of $49/year:

A full-featured copy of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise.
License to use the software for one year to monitor up to 50 devices.
One seat in the “Getting Started with GroundWork Monitor” training.
Email support incidents, up to 60 days from first registration (support incidents require that training be completed).

GroundWork Monitor 6.3 provides capabilities for customers running complex infrastructure who need to visualize their IT operations and performance from a business perspective. Features include:

Improved monitoring and network infrastructure includes the popular Cacti polling project to effectively monitor large network environments and other SNMP-enabled infrastructure.
Live-diagrams of business process, logical and physical infrastructure that’s accessible to end customers, partners and executives.
Audible alarms for events provides operators with a second communication channel so they can effectively multi-task when triaging and diagnosing alarms.
New dashboard options including new filtering options for customizing views.
Improved Java support for monitoring applications using the Oracle Weblogic 10 environment.

Webcast:

To view a Webcast demonstrating the new features of GroundWork Monitor 6.3 please visit: http://www.gwos.com/resources/webcasts/6.3.html.

About GroundWork Open Source (GWOS)

Rationalizing the Multi-Tool Environment

Nate Bennett — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:22:49 +0000

More than one monitoring tool in your environment? Considering replacing them with a framework solution? Discover how a rationalized multi-tool approach can save you 25%-50%. This white paper presents implementation steps that enable you to integrate those monitoring tools, creating a flexible, scalable and cost effective solution.

GroundWork Monitor Community Edition Update

David Dennis — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:42:59 +0000

We recently had a question on our forums asking if GroundWork Monitor CE 6.0 is “dead”.

Since the forums are mostly focused on technical issues, and this is a company policy question, we’ve decided to respond on our company blog. We’ve also edited into a Q&A format to make the responses a little easier to digest.

Q. Is GroundWork Monitor Community Edition dead?
A. No, it’s not dead. While it is true that GroundWork has not issued an update to GroundWork Monitor Community Edition in over a year, we have not made any decision that there won’t be any updates in the future, or any decision to ‘kill’ the Community Edition. Also, if you have code contributions you would like to make to GroundWork Monitor Community Edition, we would absolutely welcome them.

Q. Why is Community Edition not on the web site?
A. Community Edition is still available for download. It was moved from the GWOS site to ~~MonitoringForge.org~~ SourceForge.net in order to make it easier to navigate our site and to reflect the growing popularity of our other products. (More on this below.)

Q. Why haven’t you made any recent updates to the Community Edition?
We have found many people who used to use our free software-only (no support, no training) Community Edition actually prefer our Enterprise Quickstart. This gives them the software, Enterprise features, training and support they’re looking for a very low price ($49 for the regular version, $59 for the virtual appliance variants).

Q. Can’t you continue to develop both Community Edition and Enterprise Edition?
A. We would love to do both at the same time but our engineering resources are limited so we have to trade-off based on our customer, company and community needs. In many cases our contractual obligations to take care of the needs of our paying customers comes first.

One of the reasons we chose to bring the Enterprise Quickstart to market was because it’s the exact same codebase as our regular GroundWork Monitor Enterprise subscription, from an engineering point of view, and it enables many more people access to our flagship product.

Optimizing Application Monitoring

Nate Bennett — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 06:14:27 +0000

Tired of finding out from your customers that you’re offline? This white paper explains various methods of application monitoring and a methodology for choosing which ones make sense in your environment.

Design Principles for IT Monitoring Systems

Nate Bennett — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 06:12:37 +0000

Not getting the maximum benefit from your IT monitoring system? See how you can achieve significantly greater business benefits from monitoring, including higher application availability, higher employee productivity and lower IT capital and operating costs. This white paper presents principles that allow you to take control of your system.

Calculating the Financial Justification of Monitoring Systems

Nate Bennett — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 06:08:46 +0000

This white paper shows how to justify investment in your monitoring system by using it to calculate and improve Corporate Productivity, IT Productivity, Capital Cost Avoidance, and Enabling IT Service Management Costs.

Pricing Study: GroundWork Open Source VS HP Software

Nate Bennett — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:24:37 +0000

This study examines in detail the cost savings offered by GroundWork relative to comparable offerings from HP Software, although similar savings would also be expected for comparisons against BMC, CA, or IBM.

Java Monitoring with GroundWork Monitor

jesseesch — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:47:15 +0000

Join Arul Shanmugam, Senior Software Engineer at GroundWork, for a demonstration and discussion of best practices for monitoring Java applications. Utilizing the new Java-agent included in release 6.2, Arul will demonstrate deep Java application monitoring including visualizing application response times, database pool utilization, and connection states. Additionally, Arul will demonstrate data collection of custom application metrics using the MBean/JMX facilities.

The session will be completed using the IBM Websphere, however these best practices and approaches are also directly applicable to other products including RedHat’s JBoss and tomcat.

Features for MSPs

jesseesch — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:42:36 +0000

With Release 6.2, MSPs can set permissions so end customers can view their own infrastructures but not other clients’ deployments. These role-based infrastructure views are just one of the MSP-oriented features that Joe, GroundWork’s Lead Sales Engineer, goes over in this on-demand video of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise.

Intro to Views

jesseesch — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:38:40 +0000

In another GroundWork Live session presented by Joe and Ali, two of GroundWork’s Sales Engineers, you can learn how to use GroundWork Monitor’s extensive views to visualize your network environment. Most of these views are new to GroundWork Monitor 6.3, making monitoring and understanding your data center easier for your team and your company executives.

GroundWork and OTRS

jesseesch — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:29:42 +0000

GroundWork and OTRS (Open Technology Real Service) have teamed up to create an enterprise monitoring and two-way ticketing integration. This offering allows the direct connection of monitoring outputs with the help desk/ IT ticketing solution to give IT managers a peace of mind on information sharing and real-time reliability.

Presented by David Dennis, Sr. Director of Marketing & Business Development at GroundWork, Dr. Dave Blunt, Vice President of Services at GroundWork, and Paul Salazar, Vice President Global Sales & Marketing at ORTS, you’ll learn about the ability to submit tickets directly to OTRS via GroundWork Monitor’s interface, two-way trouble ticket communication, and the presentation of relevant ticket information within GroundWork Monitor.

Setting Up GroundWork Environment From Scratch

jesseesch — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:01:57 +0000

GroundWork Monitor is flexible and interoperable and in this GroundWork Live video you’ll learn how to set up an environment that enables all the advantages of GroundWork Monitor. Follow along with GroundWork’s Sales Engineers, Joe and Ali, as they show you the ropes on getting your first environment up and running.

User Interface Revealed

jesseesch — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:53:58 +0000

In this video the GroundWork Monitor user interface is revealed by Joe and Ali, two of GroundWork’s Sales Engineers. He shows you how to use Groundwork Monitor to maximize your monitoring productivity. The presentation of the interface falls into four main sections: Installation, Configuration, Operations and Reporting. Start making the most of your GroundWork Monitor.

Universal Log Management with ArcSight

jesseesch — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 21:14:07 +0000

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise is terrific for notifications and compiling metrics, but once you’ve identified a problem, how do you fix it? GroundWork is partnering with ArcSight to combine IT monitoring with log file analysis for quicker problem resolution.

David Dennis, Sr. Director of Marketing & Business Development for GroundWork, and Varun Kohli, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for ArcSight, show how ArcSight’s new Logger 5.0, a universal log management solution for security, compliance and IT operations, can be a workhorse for root cause analysis and troubleshooting. It enables organizations to capture, store and search on any type of information, anytime. And ArcSight Logger 5.0 is now available as a downloadable software for $49.

GroundWork and Webmetrics

jesseesch — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 05:54:15 +0000

Tired of using GroundWork to monitor your internal infrastructure and a completely separate tool to keep tabs on your external end user experience? Would you like to utilize a single dashboard for internal and external assets? With GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, now you can!

Join this webcast to learn how Webmetrics and GroundWork are coming together to deliver monitoring for all of your assets on a single console. Combine Webmetrics’ website testing and monitoring services with GroundWork Monitor’s highly customized dashboards to give you a unified view of your infrastructure.

Designed specifically for website monitoring, Webmetrics enables online businesses to address immediate performance management needs. The integration of Webmetrics into GroundWork Monitor is explained in this video by David Dennis, Sr. Director of Marketing & Business Developement at GroundWork, and Alex Barajas, System Engineer at Neustart Webmetrics.

GroundWork 6.3 Features

jesseesch — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 22:46:13 +0000

Learn all about the cacti integration and other new features in release 6.3 at this live webcast. In addition to the cacti integration for better visualization and graphing of network infrastructure, GWME 6.3 also includes a new “Views” tool, based on NagVis, that enables users to diagram their infrastructure, applications and business processes, and then to populate those views with up-to-date availability and performance information about their servers, virtual machines, applications, networks and storage.

Presented by Simon Bennett, Sr. Director of Product Management at GroundWork Open Source, you’ll learn how comprehensive monitoring, including New support for monitoring applications, Redesigned trouble-view dashboard, Improved session handling and access control and more, can now be deployed in a single step.

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Quickstart for Release 6.3 Now Available

Simon Bennett — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 09:24:40 +0000

We’re happy to announce that the latest version of Groundwork Monitor Enterprise (Release 6.3) is now available under our Enterprise Quickstart (EQS) program. For those unfamiliar with EQS, it includes:

A copy of GroundWork Monitor Release 6.3 software
Monitoring for up to 50 devices
Access to on-demand training
60 days of email-based support
Priced at $49/$59 per year depending on packaging selected

Release 6.3 adds several new capabilities including:

Show live monitoring data on diagrams and maps using the included ‘Views’ based on the NagVis open source project.
Traffic graphing and network monitoring, including integrated graphing based on the ‘Cacti’ project.
Updated Java monitoring agent adds support for Weblogic.

More details of the new feature in this release can be found here.

Current EQS customers should note that upgrades are not included in existing subscriptions, however Flex subscriptions include upgrades and a full year of support, starting at $40 per monitored device.

Release 6.3 Tackles Customer Requests

Simon Bennett — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:45:23 +0000

Today we are releasing the latest version (6.3) of our flagship GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, with a host of features our customers have asked for. The two big themes are visualization tools and the return of an old favorite—the trouble-view dashboard. We also add support for accessing GroundWork Monitor on the iPad, furthering our thrust into Mobile IT.

These new features will improve the productivity of your IT team and make it even quicker to deploy our deep network, server and application monitoring in your environment.

GWNE Release 6.3 is available today for our Flex customers, downloadable from our support portal.

https://kb.gwos.com/login.action?os_destination=%2Fdisplay%2FFLEX%2FDownloads

What’s behind the visualization theme? Network and system administrators have long known that it’s easier to understand what’s going on by using rich graphics and graphs rather than long lists of dense text. Hence the popularity of the open source cacti and NagVis projects. In Release 6.3, we include both cacti and NagVis into the core GroundWork Monitor Enterprise product.

Our new Views feature, based on NagVis, allows IT operations people to create diagrams of their environments—and then make them live with monitoring status of each element. These diagrams can be logical or physical infrastructures, and even business processes. Thus sys admins can easily create diagrams to present operations information in a form that’s accessible to end customers, partners and executives.

The GroundWork user interface combines graphs and information from multiple sources, including cacti, into a coherent single-pane view of your monitored infrastructure. For all you who have manually added cacti or NagVis to GWME, not to worry. Your existing configuration will be maintained as you upgrade to 6.3.

Return of trouble view: Our users loved the old version, back in release 5.3, because it quickly draws attention to problems now! Now it’s back in 6.3, better than ever with a targeted view of current problems with additional context information.

In other additions, note that supporting iPad gives GroundWork Monitor yet another way to make IT personnel productive, even if they’re out-and-about. Here are other new elements in Release 6.3:

Optional audio alarms in the event console (yes, they’re off by default), a feature particularly useful in large NOCs.
Updated GWOS Java monitoring agent supports Oracle Weblogic 10 application servers in addition to Red Hat JBoss, Tomcat, and IBM Websphere already supported.
Improved reliability and security for the GWOS portal application by improving session handling and access control for select
applications.
Improved layout especially with long lists of items in the configuration application.
New Quick Navigation component (for start-up menus) to access common features and functions.
Custom text for context links to related applications in status viewer.
Filter lists in dashboards to show only troubled items. Ideal for operations dashboards in large environments where a complete view is too large to display.

We expect GWOS customers to be as excited about these product improvements as we are. We owe a big thanks to our engineering team, partners and everyone involved in the projects for their contribution to this release.

Integrating ArcSight with GroundWork

Dave Lilly — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 13:40:56 +0000

Congratulations to the employees and stockholders of ArcSight on the pending sale of a great company to Hewlett-Packard. While HP and ArcSight begin the arduous task of knitting together products, channels, organizations, roadmaps, I thought you might want to know how easily products like ArcSight Logger™ and other log file security monitoring solutions can be integrated with GroundWork Monitor, the leading open source enterprise monitoring solution.

On the input side, GroundWork agents forward urgent or pre-determined matches between regular expressions and log messages for syslogs, event logs, application logs, JMS logs, log4J logs, etc. These high-impact events are in turn passed through the GroundWork state engine for pre-console event correlation. Pre-console correlation takes advantage of state awareness to correlate the monitoring system to itself, to the network, to hardware state, and to applications through multi-measure container and database modeling. In addition, the GroundWork system enriches the events with other static data and passes the de-duplicated, enriched and post-suppression event stream to the GroundWork Event Console for operator review and further action including further event data enrichment.

In addition, the logs containing all of the events generated from within the GroundWork monitoring system are passed into the Log Analysis system where modern search algorithms can be applied for forensic analysis, compliance checking and auditing, and for input to root cause determination and problem management. This unitizes the data flow for these purposes as well as for any archiving of application monitoring data required for regulatory compliance.

Also, any alarms or notification messages generated from within the Log Analysis system can be sent to the GroundWork system for conditioning, notification and escalation management using the powerful features of GroundWork Monitor to perform these functions. The goal is to unitize the notification and escalation workflow to avoid operator confusion and duplicate system maintenance.

At the top of the diagram the entire user interface of the Log Analysis application is shown. The U/I is easily wrapped into the JSR 168 compliant portlets employed within the JBoss Portal supplied with GroundWork Monitor. This provides three additional benefits:

Single Sign-On and unitized access control for both products (and ideally for all system management applications employed within the environment).
Secure cross links between the availability and performance monitoring system and the security and compliance monitoring system user interface allowing both systems to provide richer context for the interpretation of results and indications.
Mash-Up Dashboards containing U/I and report components from both systems (and ideally for all other system management tools). This provides the single pane of glass combining any and all system management information into holistic views of relative risk, service levels and business process models for IT infrastructure and application management.

At GroundWork we wish our friends at ArcSight every continued success with the HP merger. And if you would like to see ArcSight integrated with enterprise monitoring soon we will be happy to help and would love to hear from you.

How Green is your IT?

David Dennis — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:49:40 +0000

Green IT has been a hot topic of late, and GroundWork Open Source is looking for ways to help users make their IT greener while saving money on electricity. Our partner Modius® Software is the leading provider of performance management software the power and cooling systems that run data centers.

For years, IT and Facilities have been separate domains, rare to meet. But that’s changing. We think that integrating GroundWork Monitor Enterprise (GWME) with Modius’ software would make life easier for enterprises that want to monitor their systems, networks, electrical and cooling equipment.

But before we do, we want your input. We have just fielded a survey to learn what customers think about such an integration and how it would be most useful to them. We’re looking at how to integrate GWOS’ IT monitoring software with facilities management software–connecting the department that burns energy (IT) with the folks who pay the power bills (Facilities). At least historically.

This one-page survey addresses how your IT and Facilities departments currently interact, and how you’d like them to work together. You can help us prioritize our product roadmap and partnering strategy by completing this one-page survey.

Reaching out to MSPs

Simon Bennett — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:16:36 +0000

This week we launched a microsite (msp.gwos.com) designed for Web hosters, managed service providers (MSPs), outsourcers and other service providers that monitor large distributed systems and networks. Many MSPs and service providers already monitor with open source Nagios® software, the core of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, and we want them to see what affordable GWME adds to Nagios.

Most MSPs already offer monitoring to their clients, but our latest GWME version, Release 6.2, adds features that will please everyone with large deployments to monitor. Among them: dashboards for their clients, role-based infrastructure views, enhanced monitoring for VMware virtualization and Java, and more.

Already, top Service Providers such as Hitachi Consulting UK Ltd., Germany’s NTS Netzwerk Telekom Service, AG and Hosting.com rely on GWOS ¬to monitor tens of thousands of network devices and systems for customers.

With a low entry price of $2,000/year to monitor 50 devices (that’s around $3.33 per device per month), the new pricing for offers an affordable on-ramp into the MSP business. Budding MSPs can start easily, then scale for volume with GWME’s pay-as-you-grow pricing.

For more on GWME’s Service Provider features, visit our sparkling new GroundWork for MSPs site at msp.gwos.com. Or spend time with the “What’s New for MSPs in GWME 6.2” webcast.

The GroundWork Team

Announcing Enterprise Quickstart Changes

Simon Bennett — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:12:33 +0000

Almost a year ago, we introduced the GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Quickstart.

The goal was to offer an cost-effective and efficient way for companies to deploy GWOS Monitor in their environment. We wanted to go beyond the usual “access to the software” and include support and training to really help evaluators and users be successful with our solution.

We’ve learned a lot in the intervening year – in response to customer feedback we rolled out a range of new EQS packaging options based on virtual machines and also introduced a version tailored to Amazon’s EC2 service. All are focused on getting administrators up and running as quickly as possible.

Uptake of Enterprise Quickstart outstripped my wildest expectations. Hundreds of companies from all over the world have used this offering to solve monitoring problems across a wide spectrum of industries. We’ve also seen new uses of GWOS technologies in the cloud, in OEM applications and at service providers that started with an EQS purchase by a curious administrator. Beyond the data center, customers are monitoring ATM machines, cash registers and other devices.

We’ve gathered a huge amount of feedback on the Quickstart program and today are announcing some changes to make it an even more compelling offering:

The Enterprise Quickstart is now an official member of the GWOS product line-up. Given its success we intend to continue the program on an on-going basis.
Enterprise Quickstart has been upgraded to Enterprise Edition Release 6.2. The features added in this version are described here. Anyone purchasing EQS after today will receive the new version.
We’ve lowered the minimum Flex subscription (which includes software upgrades) to $2,000 per year for email support. This makes the full subscription solution with production-grade support accessible to many more companies where small but critical infrastructure requires monitoring.
We have reduced the number of devices included under the Enterprise Quickstart program from 100 devices to 50 devices. This is to maintain consistency between our EQS and Flex programs and affects less than 15% of customers currently using the EQS program.

We hope that these changes will lead to a wider adoption of GroundWork Monitor and as a result, drive more efficient IT operations for a wider range of companies.

Full details of the revamped Enterprise Quickstart can be found here and in our FAQ.

What’s next for GroundWork Monitor?

Simon Bennett — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:02:00 +0000

We’re planning out some great new capabilities for GroundWork Monitor and a wanted to share a taste of things to come. We’re simultaneously working in a couple of core areas:

Visualization of monitoring information through different lenses – physical topology, business process and logical flow. Our partners have been very active building solutions in this area and we’re working to include their expertise to improve Monitor Enterprise.
Different Configuration use-cases. The current Monarch configuration tool is a very popular component of GroundWork Monitor but it is far from perfect. We’re looking at ways Monarch can be made easier to use. In addition we’re taking a step back to look at new approaches to configuration that account for different types of users including less-experienced administrators and people coming from other tools who aren’t steeped in the history, tradition and conventions of tools such as Nagios® Core, RRDtool, Cacti and SNMPtt.

These initiatives will be the basis of our Enterprise Edition 6.3 and 6.4 releases respectively. From a time-line perspective we’re targeting 90-120 days between releases to balance our quality, stability and feature development goals.

Connectors and integrations for GroundWork Monitor are another area we’re expanding with the help of some great technology partners. If you haven’t already done so we’d love to hear your thoughts on incident management and ticketing over at this short, one-page survey.

As always your questions and comments are appreciated to sbennett (at) gwos (dot) com.

Share Your Thoughts: Monitoring + Trouble Ticketing

David Dennis — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:05:34 +0000

We regularly receive feedback from customers and other GroundWork Monitor users about product features and integrations that would make GroundWork Monitor more useful to them. Lately, we’ve been getting more questions about integrating GroundWork Monitor with trouble ticketing and help desk systems.

You can help guide GWOS in our product roadmap and partnering strategy by completing a one-page, 9-question survey.

We appreciate your help!

Swinging Big

Staff — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:56:12 +0000

It’s nice to be noticed. GWOS has had multiple tweets on our recent Wall Street Journal ad. Tireless Matt Assay “mjasay” has checked in, as did Erica Brescia, CEO of our partner Bitrock, and industry analyst Eric Goodness. Humbly, let me say that GroundWork Open Source is doing lots worth noticing lately.

I can’t say for sure which marketing campaigns will work and which won’t. Certainly, we swung big with our first-ever Wall Street Journal ad. But we are swinging big in a lot of ways these days – and the results are quite positive.

In June, we announced that our customer base has quadrupled in the last eight months.
On July 8, we launched V6.2, with special features for service providers and a new service from Neustar Webmetrics that allows our customers to view their internal and external monitoring side-by-side from a single console.
In another recent partnership, we’ve added Cloud Connector for Eucalyptus, which combines application and cloud health monitoring for Eucalyptus and UEC-based private clouds. It combines monitoring of private clouds and internal datacenters.
We’ve also launched a series of innovative marketing campaigns, including a program to offer free industry certifications to our new customers.
Meanwhile, we are still making GroundWork Monitor Community edition available for free for the community. We’re up to V6.0 now with more updates planned soon.

And we’re not finished by a long shot. Watch this space!

Ubuntu Debut for GWOS Virtual Appliance

Staff — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 09:44:48 +0000

If you are an Ubuntu shop, we are happy to deliver a pre-configured GroundWork Monitor Enterprise appliance built upon Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10.

Last month, we announced support for Enterprise Server (excluding NMS add-ons) running on Ubuntu, and this month we package it up so that you have a stable, ready-to-go package that can get Enterprise Edition 6.1.1 up and running in under 10 minutes.

The Enterprise Quickstart Ubuntu powered appliance costs $59 for a year. It includes Enterprise 6.1.1 and coverage for any 100 devices on your network. The $59 also gets you a four hour, self-paced, online training class which will help with any configuration questions you may have. It also comes with 60 days of unlimited email support after completing the training class.

Buy Enterprise Quickstart

The little things are the big things

Simon Bennett — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:45:19 +0000

I’m happy to announce we just released GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.1.1. As a minor release it doesn’t have much in the way of new features but it does include some really popular customer requests:

Status viewer page load times greatly improved. Our testing team claims navigating around the status viewer is 25-30% faster than 6.1 – feels a lot quicker than that to me.
New status viewer tab behaviour – whizzing around Status Viewer means more tabs get opened. There’s now is now a button to clean them all up with a single-click.
A significant problem with the availability reports was reported and addressed in this release. Highly recommended for our advanced reports mavens.

As always the complete list of changes (over 75) are included in the release notes. Don’t forget updates and new releases are included in our Flex subscriptions, something to think about if you’re considering paying someone else to upgrade to their next version?

GroundWork 6.2 Features

Nate Bennett — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:02:38 +0000

Learn about the features and functionality of GroundWork Monitor 6.2 including role-based infrastructure views, the new Java monitoring agent, updated best practice monitoring profile with support for VMware vSphere, ESX 4 and ESXi 4, updated GWOS Seurat view for better visualization of unacknowledged problems and numerous productivity improvements across the status viewer, event console and notifications system to streamline incident management.

Release 6.1 – now with 105% more customer goodness

Simon Bennett — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:13:29 +0000

2009 was a fantastic year for GWOS, the investments we made in the Release 6 platform, Flex pricing and Enterprise Quickstart paying off in a massive increase in the GWOS install base. Those new users brought a lot of new use-cases and ideas and suggestions for improvements we’ve chopped, diced, sautéed and baked into our first release of 2010.

One of the biggest changes we’ve introduced is support for Ubuntu Server in both the 8.04 LTS and 9.10 variants. Many of the customers I spoke with were impressed by the quality of the Ubuntu Server platform in their data-center and appreciate the convenience that comes from running Ubuntu on their desktop too. Of course we continue to support RedHat Enterprise Linux and Novell’s SLES – the latter of which is the basis of our popular SuSE-powered virtual appliance. A full run-down of the contents of the new release is available now.

We’ve got a busy year planned out with some exciting new capabilities in the works. We’re always happy to get ideas and suggestions for new areas we should be looking at. Please join the discussion on Twitter, Facebook or MonitoringForge.org.

GroundWork 6.1 Features Ubuntu

jesseesch — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:20:19 +0000

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition release 6.1 builds on the capabilities of the very popular 6.0 release. This release adds new features, support for Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS and 9.10 and includes over 100 different improvements and bug fixes.

In this webcast we’ll explain why we’re excited about Ubuntu Server and explain how Ubuntu users can try GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition release 6.1 for themselves. Simon Bennett, Sr. Director of Product Management, will demonstrate the new features now available in the GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition 6.1. Participants are encouraged to ask questions to both speakers in the Q&A at the end.

GroundWork 6.0 Features

jesseesch — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:10:28 +0000

GroundWork Monitor 6.0 is right around the corner and we’re excited to show you all the new enhancements and new features we’ve been working on. Join Simon Bennet, GroundWork’s Product Manager, for this On-demand webcast where he led us on a deep dive into 6.0, including: Redesigned user interface and navigation, revamped Status Viewer with new capabilities, new dashboard capabilities, JBoss portal functionality and the new GroundWork Developer’s Portal.