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.
Issue affecting GWOS monitoring solutions during the daylight saving change Versions affected: GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.1 or later.
We have identified an issue with one of the components of the GroundWork Monitor Enterprise product. This issue will cause some types of monitoring checks to fail after Sunday 5th November 2010 at 0200 hours, when the change in daylight saving time occurs.
The affected component can be reset by following the instructions listed here. Two workarounds are provided – one for systems already exhibiting this problem, another that can be scheduled to recover and resume normal operations at a predetermined time.
Customers with a current Flex subscription may obtain additional assistance by contacting us at [email protected].
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.
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.
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.
The integration touch points between GroundWork and a log file analyzer are illustrated in the following diagram.
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.
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.
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.
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