GroundWork Blog

Ganglia Get-Together at GroundWork

October 6, 2008 – 1:08 pm by Peter Mui

BayLISA Monitoring SIG XVIII (October 8, 2008): Ganglia Get-Together, Q&A

Bernard Li, Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belon, and other members of the Ganglia Project Team (www.ganglia.info) will be on hand for impromptu Q&A on monitoring using Ganglia (”It’s not just for grids and clusters!”).  Spike Morelli from Linden Lab and Jonah Horowitz from LookSmart will also be on hand to provide background and insight on real-world Ganglia implementations.

What:    BayLISA Monitoring SIG XVIII: Ganglia Get-Together, Q&A
Who:     Anyone interested in IT monitoring issues and tools (newbies particularly welcome!)
When:   Wednesday, Oct 8  2008, 7PM
Where: GroundWork Open Source, 139 Townsend St., San Francisco
How:     139 Townsend St. is very near AT&T Ballpark. It is one and a half blocks from the CalTrain Depot. Take the MUNI N or T or trolley to 2nd and King (ballpark stop) or take the 30 or 45 bus (among others) crosstown. Free evening street parking can probably be found, and there are several fee-based parking garages around in case of parking difficulty.
Cost:     Free!!

Piping hot pizza, a variety of high-fructose corn syrup fizzy drinks (and other drinks too), and a potpourri of snack foods provided by GroundWork. We’ll open up the doors at 6:30 or so and start the formal part of the meeting promptly at 7PM.

RSVP (not necessary, but helpful): Peter Mui, pmui@groundworkopensource.com, 415-992-4573, www.groundworkopensource.com

Posted in: General Monitoring, Monitoring SIG, News, Open Source | | No Comments |

LAMP-Stack Engineer Needed

September 26, 2008 – 12:50 pm by Amy Abascal

GroundWork Open Source is looking to immediately enlist the services of a solid LAMP stack web applications engineer.  This is a contract position for an estimated 100-150 hours, to complete several projects, which are due by mid-October.  Candidate will work remotely but must be able to communicate statuses and milestones effectively and frequently.  Applicants should be available to start as early as Monday, September 29.

Get more information on the LAMP-Stack Engineer job posting.

Posted in: News | | 1 Comment |
Tags: job postings, LAMP, php, web applications

Participate in the Cost Challenge Webcast on Sept 30

September 16, 2008 – 9:01 am by Tara Spalding

• Evaluating IT budgets for 2009?
• Are you running HP, IBM, CA or BMC as your monitoring tool?
• Looking to reduce spend to free up wallet share for other IT initiatives?

Join our webcast “ IT Monitoring Cost Challenge – HP Operations vs. GroundWork Open Source” on September 30 9am PT/ noon ET/ 5pm GMT.

Sign up now:

https://www.techwebonlineevents.com/ars/eventregistration.do?mode=eventreg&F=1001117&K=1AA1D1

Hosted by Information Week

Tim Clark from the FactPoint Group will share his insights on node based pricing used by the Big 4. He will explain how either Big 4 customers are over-paying for incomplete monitoring deployments or are over–paying to monitor custom applications.

David Dennis from GroundWork Open Source will explain how GroundWork Monitor Enterprise removes these pricing barriers and saves customers up to 87% of their maintenance cost which they were paying for annually. David will also share how node based pricing is no longer popular as it is unaccommodating to the ever-changing IT environment.

All participants will receive a cost analysis how-to guide to assist you on evaluating your potential cost savings by making the switch from proprietary, Big 4 monitoring to an open source alternative that doesn’t charge you by device.

Posted in: Uncategorized | | No Comments |
Tags: BMC Patrol, CA Unicenter, HP Operations, IBM Tivoli, Monitoring Cost Analysis, OpenView, The FactPoint Group, Tim Clark, webcast

IPV6 at the Monitoring SIG

September 11, 2008 – 1:40 pm by Peter Mui

Thanks to Stephan Baur, Sr. Director, Enterprise Architecture & Technology, Cisco and Roger Rüttimann, Director Software Development, GroundWork Open Source Inc. for leading a highly animated discussion about IPV6 at last night’s Monitoring SIG.

Here are their slides:

ipv6-era-of-transformation-final1

Roger also adds in his comment (below) the link to the case study that was handed out at the SIG:
Planning and Accomplishing the IPv6 Integration: Lessons Learned from a Global Construction and Project-Management Company

http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/pr67/pr41/docs/C11-439724-00_PlanningandAccomplishingtheIPv6Integration_v2.pdf

Also: here’s and IPV6 article that just came out in Network World: it’s a transcript of an interview among several people:

http://www.networkworld.com/chat/archive/2008/091108-ipv6-strategies-chat.html

Videos of the post-presentation discussion are on Youtube here:

IPv6: “Why Should I Care?”

IPv6: Use Cases Discussion

IPv6: Extended Discussion

All great material for discussion and for our next SIG meeting on IPV6.  Is your company moving towards IPV6?  What challenges are you facing?

Posted in: Applications, General Monitoring, Monitoring SIG | | 1 Comment |

On-Demand Enterprise on GroundWork & Ganglia

August 28, 2008 – 2:54 pm by David Dennis

Continuing the Ganglia and grid theme of this week, Dennis Barker at On-Demand Enterprise (previously known as GRID Today) has written an extensive article about the use of Ganglia and GroundWork in large scale grid and cluster environments.

Article excerpt:

“GroundWork Open Source has been doing it since 2004, and probably has the most extensive system out there for large networks, on par capability-wise with the packages from the large, commercial companies. In fact, IDC analyst Tracy Corbo describes GroundWork’s offering as a “framework for system management” rather than just a performance-monitoring program…..Probably the best example of GroundWork “pulling in” other capabilities is its tie-in to Ganglia, the open source monitoring system developed specifically for large distributed environments like clusters and grids. Ganglia is used by serious customers: NASA; the National Institutes of Health; San Diego Supercomputing Center; Boeing; Lockheed-Martin; HP; Dell; Microsoft; Cisco; and Sun, where it’s part of the Grid Infrastructure reference architecture.”

Posted in: News, Open Source | | No Comments |
Tags: cluster monitoring, Dennis Barker, Ganglia, Ganglia integration, Grid Monitoring, on-demand monitoring, Saas

Roberto Galoppini: Open Source on Wall Street

August 27, 2008 – 4:32 pm by David Dennis

Once again, Roberto Galoppini has a keen eye for the big picture, this time providing some great insight and commentary on the continuing momentum open source IT management is achieving in the financial services sector.

We should have some additional news regarding GroundWork and the financial services sector in the coming months, and look forward to additional thoughts from Roberto then, as well.

Posted in: News, Open Source | | No Comments |
Tags: Mary Knox, open source financial services, Roberto Galoppini