[Ali]

GroundWork is considering a possible revision of the Community Edition. Please respond to the survey above.

Please note that you must be signed in to participate in this survey. If you don't have an account, create one by clicking here.

Thank you,
Ali Mousavi
GroundWork Online Marketing Manager

[Alex Litvak]

I need it to be all of the above with being Open Source as a last priority, but Free / Features have the same weight or if not free then affordable at least.

[David]

Alex Litvak, on 14 July 2011 - 12:34 PM, said:

I need it to be all of the above with being Open Source as a last priority, but Free / Features have the same weight or if not free then affordable at least.

Hi Alex,

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

With regard to it being open source, can you elaborate on why this is important to you?

The reason I ask: very few people have ever asked for the source code of GroundWork Monitor, so it doesn't appear that most people want to modify it in that way.

Thanks,

David

[lashby]

I voted other. The most important feature request to me is a sane pricing policy when migrating to Enterprise Edition. We are monitoring around 200 hosts with CE, and need to add another 100. At those levels, EE is simply too expensive. I don't need free, but I can't justify the cost difference to our beancounters. Either we stay with CE which does 90%of what we need, (or even bare Nagios or Icinga). or pay a lot more money for Enterprise Edition.

You have a good product. Make it easier for me to give you money, please.

[David]

lashby, on 14 July 2011 - 12:50 PM, said:

I voted other. The most important feature request to me is a sane pricing policy when migrating to Enterprise Edition. We are monitoring around 200 hosts with CE, and need to add another 100. At those levels, EE is simply too expensive. I don't need free, but I can't justify the cost difference to our beancounters. Either we stay with CE which does 90%of what we need, (or even bare Nagios or Icinga). or pay a lot more money for Enterprise Edition.

You have a good product. Make it easier for me to give you money, please.

Hi lashby,

What sort of organization do you work for?

We're exploring some special options for non-profits and philanthropic organizations.

Thanks,

David

[lashby]

David, on 14 July 2011 - 12:54 PM, said:

Hi lashby,

What sort of organization do you work for?

We're exploring some special options for non-profits and philanthropic organizations.

Thanks,

David

Telecom related, so we don't qualify as either unfortunately.

[cdhouchins]

David, on 14 July 2011 - 12:54 PM, said:

Hi lashby,

What sort of organization do you work for?

We're exploring some special options for non-profits and philanthropic organizations.

Thanks,

David

We're using the community edition of GWOS right now at the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Washington University in St. Louis. We have around 300 servers monitored right now and growing every month. As an educational non-profit division of WashU we simply can't afford the commercial version as priced. I'd definitely be interested in hearing of any new options available to organizations like ours. We're big open source supporters but aren't afraid to pay for support when we can afford it.

[David]

cdhouchins, on 14 July 2011 - 01:11 PM, said:

We're using the community edition of GWOS right now at the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Washington University in St. Louis. We have around 300 servers monitored right now and growing every month. As an educational non-profit division of WashU we simply can't afford the commercial version as priced. I'd definitely be interested in hearing of any new options available to organizations like ours. We're big open source supporters but aren't afraid to pay for support when we can afford it.

Let's talk, PM sent.

[mkultra]

Being cost-free is requisite for a ocmmunity edition.

Being open source isn't a requirement in itself, but it helps for special usecases as well as satisfies many organizations' concerns regarding mitigating their risk in either edition/model. Open source also allows for extensibility and refinement that might require a patch/hack to satisfy a requirement if one is willing to take on the risk.

Also, regarding OSS, community implies shared development so even if large portions are closed, some things must remain open to really be a community at all.

Perhaps you could change/extend support or services model?

Cheers
Matthew

[frojon]

Chose Open Source over Free because I believe it is important to be able to look at code and know how something works rather than have it be a 'black box' proprietary system. I use GWOS 5.2.1 Nagios components and then created the Cacti framework in GWOS. Works great for me to monitor systems in a resort hotel environment.
I like the Open Source software of things like Red Hat, Centos, Fedora, etc not because I want to examine and change the code, but because of the philosophy of Open Source.

Frojon Banwell
San Diego, CA

[Levent]

Community is important, without it many products wouldn't be where they are now. GroundWork is great and has a history and I'm sure a large user base compared with other products. You have some serious competition out there, but I would be reluctant to trial any if there wasn't a Community release without limitations. As a consultant, I would be reluctant to invest considerable time into a product that didn't have this, because some customers may have the capacity to pay license/support fees, others don't. Some have the resources to implement and others require services. There will always need to be a balance. I think what is forgotten with some organisations is that the Community requires support, code and donation$. I've learnt that no matter how much you emphasis this, it seems to fall on deaf ears, so what comes into play is a Community clause to ensure donations and a GPL release of any enhancements.
I think after almost 2 years since your last community release, to ensure you stay competitive in Monitoring (not just with Nagios users) you need to incorporate further enhancements. This will be important for those that don't have the technical capability or resources to manually enhance 6.01 to what others are offering. It will also show those that place an importance on how active and current the releases are, that in fact you are.

THANK YOU for a great product. I look forward to future releases.

[Thomas Rosenkranz]

for us, the most important issue is that it has to be affordable and extensible.
It doesn't have to be absolutely cost free.
Availability of the source code is not important.

Thomas

[Partners in IT]

It is very difficult to choose as It's tempting to ask for all the features of the EE in the CE and for free howeever this is obviously unreasonable. To realease the CE as a version or 2 behind the EE is probably the best approach as then the two releases are similar enough for GWOS to support (or at least assist) with problems in the CE. This allows those that wan't the new advanced features can get them and are helping to fund them and there is also the free version which allows the open source developers to modify and customise as they need to. The option to domate towards the community edition would possibly also be a good idea which could help keep the CE close to the EE

Hope this helps

Andy

[Keith McMillan]

Hi there

We have been using the Community Ed for a two years and have found it to be a very useful product. Your three options are important to me, however I would consider the following the most important:

1. Needs to be much more affordable than the enterprise edition (would love to have it, but there is simply not possible to justify the cost per host, particulary since we monitor almost all our devices, switches, VM's) This is specifically as I would never expect to call on support. Would be happy to pay for a version (similar to your initial Quickstart or even more, just needed more devices).

2. Being more up todate than the current version is critical - having all the Enterprise features is not as important, just nice.

3. Open source - this is about trust and the occasional need to tweak the nagios scripts to perform checks more suitable to our network.

thanks
Keith

[andublin]

Community edition didn't have the feature set to be useful, and Enterprise was too expensive for SME. So I stepped away. To try again: maybe a node-limited version for the community edition with enterprise features.

[David]

Keith McMillan, on 15 July 2011 - 02:30 AM, said:

3. Open source - this is about trust and the occasional need to tweak the nagios scripts to perform checks more suitable to our network.

thanks
Keith

Just FYI, you can actually edit those scripts in the Enterprise Edition, too.

[Eugen Pankratz]

Vote reply:

The community edition should be free and 100% open source. It should be compatible (pahts, database functions etc) with the EE to facilitate software development. It could be acceptable to restrict some features to the EE.

[David]

andublin, on 15 July 2011 - 04:14 AM, said:

To try again: maybe a node-limited version for the community edition with enterprise features.

Hi Andublin,

Thanks for the feedback.

If we were to do as you state in the quote above, what do you think would be a reasonable node limit?

Thanks,

David

[Hans Engelen]

I voted Open Source because it implies 'free' as well as 'open source'. Why Open Source, well frankly because the recent move to JBoss for the user interface comes with mixed feelings for me. My biggest gripe being that the interface is not what I would call user friendly or intuitive and certainly not with regards to customizing how it looks (which is exactly what the 'applet' approach was supposed to enhance).

Truth be told, and maybe this is just me, I use only the old style Nagios screens for looking up states quickly and NagVis to create a more intuitive display. I also dislike the 'lag' between Nagios and the JBoss frontend IMMENSELY. This is possibly a problem on our end but it is one we have experienced in all versions. The methods employed to feed Nagios results into the GW database has always baffled me tremendously. Not only are they slowing down the whole flow of information they also make tracking and troubleshooting issues needlessly difficult.

This for me is the main reason why I feel Open Source is needed. And lets not forget, GW is made with Open Source efforts. In my opinion the whole enterprise version should be released as open source too and only support on that Open Sourced Enterprise version should be offered at a cost.

It would help in finally getting some of the long lasting problems out of the GW system thanks to effort from that Open Source community.

[ludwig]

hi,

Open Source is most important for me cause we have to modify some parts of GWOS to suit our requirements ( new version of nagios or php,...)
the question of costs is important too, it doesn't need to be for free but as a public university we have a verry low budget for monitoring issues.