VMWare Edition for GroundWork Monitor Open Source 5.0.5 now available

In addition to:

1) the updated Red Hat / CentOS rpm,

2) the new SuSE 9 and SuSE 10 rpms, and

3) the updated bootable ISO,

a new VMWare edition, also based on GWMOS 5.0.5, is now downloadable from SourceForge at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=160654

It’s a LARGE download (>700MB) but if you’re looking to monitor through a VMWare virtualized environment we think it’s well worth it. Power on the appliance and Groundwork Monitor Open Source will immediately begin to monitor public Internet hosts and services. Use the configured items to expand monitoring to your IT infrastructure beyond simple ping requests and network scans. Key Open Source projects integrated in the appliance are:

- Nagios for great availability status correlation, event handling and accurate alerting
- Groundwork Monarch for MySQL/WebUI-Based Nagios Configuration
- Groundwork RRD Perfmon for Nagios. Track disk space, bandwidth utilization, memory, swap and more over time, using Nagios perf data or status text for RRD input.
- Groundwork Foundation Reporting for Baseline and Service SLA measurements
- Groundwork Guava for a Web 2.0 user experience built with Apache, PHP, SOAP and MySQL on CentOS Linux.

Visit http://www.nagiosexchange.com/ to explore freely available plugins for Nagios that can be used to monitor a variety of IP devices. Use NMAP in the Groundwork portal to discover hosts and assign monitoring profiles. Generate basic SLA reports showing uptime or downtime.

The appliance was built on a custom install of CentOS v4.4 with only required components installed. IPTables restricts access to ssh, http and https. SE Linux is disabled and only Xwindows is installed. Use ssh and http to access the virtual machine when powered on. It was built with VMware Server running on a WindowsXP host and tested on a RH host.

Security Warning: This virtual appliance assumes there is only a single admin/operator that requires CLI access. If you need more than 1 person logging into the appliance’s operating system (CLI), it is *STRONGLY* recommended that you further secure the appliance by installing SUDO and avoiding use of the root account. Don’t let your monitoring system become a vulnerability for hackers to exploit!

Security Warning: The MySQL password is not set.

Setup:

Dowload and unzip the appliance to your machine. Also download and install VMWare player from http://www.vmware.com/ on your computer. Consider editing the VM settings for Network. and Memory. The default uses NAT for network and 512MB RAM. Change from NAT to Bridged to assign a fixed IP for your VM. Kudzu will step you through the IP Config. Change to 1GB RAM or more if you plan to monitor >50 services.

Power on with VMware Player and then:

- Login to the console as “groundwork” password “monitor”
- Inside the Xwindows screen shell, determine the IP address assigned to your virtual machine by VMware player.

#su -
(Password is opensource)
#ifconfig -a eth0

This will show you the IP address assigned by VMWare on boot.

- From your host OS, open a browser to the appliance using the IP address determined above. Note that this virtual appliance is configured to use VMWare NAT and that CentOS is configured to use DHCP from the VMWare network device.

http://

This is the Groundwork Portal. There are 2 logins configured

admin - admin (full access)
joe - joe (operator access)

With either login, you can view the status overview or map view of the hosts configured for monitoring. Provided your PC running VMWare has Internet access, the system will begin monitoring Internet DNS/HTTP hosts. These serve as examples to help users get started quickly and easily.

What’s New in GWOpen5:

- Integrated Performance Monitoring

Groundwork has released to Open Source a performance monitoring application for Nagios. You can automatically create RRDs from Nagios plugin output. New RRD templates can be created using the Performance Configuration application available in the portal.

- Groundwork Foundation Web Services

Groundwork has released to Open Source the Groundwork Foundation Web Service. This can be used to enable programmatic access to the status and event data generated by Groundwork Monitor Open Source. Power users can now interface external applications like Helpdesk or Inventory systems to Groundwork Monitor for reporting purposes.