Announcing Enterprise Quickstart Changes

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.

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Tags: Enterprise Quickstart, GroundWork Monitor 6.2

What’s next for GroundWork Monitor?

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.

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Tags: 6.3, 6.4, connectors, enterprise, GroundWork, monitor, roadmap, ticketing

Share Your Thoughts: Monitoring + Trouble Ticketing

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!

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

Swinging Big

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!

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Enterprise 6.2 Ready for Flex Customers; New IT Certification reimbursement for EQS

GWOS’ momentum continues.

Last week the team released an advanced Enterprise solution targeted to companies who are service providers or who are managing complex web application and java environments. Simon Bennett hosted an introduction to 6.2 webcast that had hundreds of participants!

More information about 6.2 here: http://www.groundworkopensource.com/products/whats-new-6.2.html

For Enterprise Quickstart (EQS) customers who are getting a jumpstart on monitoring before their summer vacation time kicks in… we are offering a sweepstakes program that qualifies new customers the chance to get up to $4500 in reimbursement for attaining an IT certification from organizations like RedHat, Oracle, Eucalyptus, Novell, Ubuntu, Linux Foundation and more.

Interested in getting IT Education funds and time to actually complete a course? Start by purchasing EQS for $49. More on the sweepstakes rules and regulations here.

Posted in: News, Uncategorized | | No Comments |
Tags: GroundWork Monitor 6.2, IT Certification, Java, Linux Foundation, MSP, Novell, Oracle, redhat, ubuntu, Web application monitoring

Busy Week at GWOS: Announce Cloud Connector and Quadruple Customer Base

GWOS announced the GroundWork Monitor Cloud Connector for Eucalyptus on Wednesday - which allows customers the ability to monitor applications hosted in a private cloud and get deep resource and efficiency reporting.

This product was launched as a beta a few months ago and proved itself with the early adoptors.

“By adding application and host monitoring to cloud computing management, Persistent Systems has a better understanding of the services in which the private cloud renders,” said Girish Katdare, senior project manager, cloud and SaaS competency, Persistent Systems Ltd. “GWOS Cloud Connector allowed us to expand our existing Eucalyptus cloud offering, enabling us to utilize our high end resources more efficiently and ensuring that our managed services customers will ultimately have better service.”

Read more about the Cloud Connector here:

http://www.groundworkopensource.com/products/cloud.html

GWOS quadruples customer base in eight months, seeing a rise in customers who are switching from HP Operations, BMC Patrol, IBM Tivoli and CA Unicenter.

The new GWOS customers switching from these expensive monitoring tools have saved over $1,200,000 this year alone in annual maintenance fees. GWOS is glad to be re-allocating IT funds into more productive and innovative areas in IT.

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Tags: Cloud Connector, Customers, eucalyptus, GWOS, TCO