New Years’ Resolution for IT Admins: Get Your Monitoring Up to Speed

Happy New Year!

When I select my New Years’ resolution, I like to pick a personal goal and a professional goal. However, I think that for sysadmins, an ineffective monitoring solution is something that greatly impacts both your work and your home life. Over-active alerts are a great way to drive your spouse nuts. On the other hand, having to make a trip to the colo at 4am because you didn’t get an alert is even more aggravating.

Let’s talk about some simple steps you can take towards improving your monitoring tools in 2010.

1. Start with GroundWork Monitor Quickstart

   Whether you work for a small organization or a large enterprise, you can take advantage of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Quickstart SUSE VM for only $59/year. At that price, it’s a no-brainer!

   For the Enterprise user, this is a great way to set up a proof of concept if you are considering upgrading Nagios or switching from a Big 4 solution. Because it’s a virtual appliance, installation takes minutes.

   We also have other Enterprise Quickstart options starting at just $49/year.

2. Take the Getting Started Course

   The GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Quickstart comes with five hours of online training that includes product training as well as monitoring best practices. Take the guesswork out of it and leverage our experts.

3. Consider your current environment and next steps
   • Migrating from Nagios? Start with this 12-minute tutorial.
   • Considering dumping your expensive Big 4 solution? This 40-minute webcast talks about what to consider.
   • Not sure if management will sign-off on an open source product? Watch this webinar on justifying open source to executive management.

Finally, GroundWork’s friendly support staff and our professional services team can offer a variety of suggestions and solutions to make 2010 the year that your network management software stops being a headache and becomes a cost-effective and efficient tool.

Posted in: General Monitoring | | No Comments |
Tags: enterprise quick start, network management software

Introducing Enterprise Edition SUSE Powered Virtual Application

Today GWOS launches Enterprise Edition VM - built on a fully supported SLES 11 stack. The Enterprise Quickstart bundle costs $59 annually, permitting the customer to monitor 100 devices with the VM.

Puchase the Enterprise Quickstart SUSE Powered Virtual App now.

This virtual appliance combines GroundWork Monitor Enterprise with a fully supported version of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 from Novell.

Enterprise Quickstart SUSE Powered Virtual Appliance was built as part of the SUSE Appliance Program and offers:

• A fully-supported and licensed version of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.
• The benefits and assurances of enterprise class Linux in a convenient virtual appliance.
• A full-featured copy of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.0.
• License to use the software for one year to monitor up to 100 devices.
• One seat in “Getting Started with GroundWork Monitor” training.
• Unlimited email support incidents for a single contact within the first 60 days of registration (requires completion of the training class).
• Fast, certified installation and setup of the monitoring server.

Posted in: General Monitoring, News | | 1 Comment |
Tags: Enterprise Edition, GroundWork Monitor, GWOS, Novell, SLES, Suse

GWOS barCAMP Oct 21 & 22, online, free, interactive IT management training

GWOS is excited to see the participation in this endeavor - delivering several micro-training sessions that range in topics covering technical customizations with GroundWork Monitor 6.0 to monitoring applications and network management best practices to what’s new with GWOS.

Each session is 45 minutes long, hosted on WebEx, and have active audio so open dialogs can occur between the presenter and the participants.

All are formatted to demo the featured topic, open up for Q&A and allow others to share their expertise.

To register or join a session:
1. Clink on the ‘Join Now’ link below when the session commences
2. Sign in using the password b1rCAMP
3. Participate by asking questions or providing your experiences with the others.

Read more about the purpose and presentation opportunity with GWOS barCAMP.

Wednesday, 10/21
• 6 a.m. PT (9 a.m. ET): Walkthrough on Flex Pricing - Join Now
• 7 a.m. PT (10 a.m. ET): Custom Performance Graphs in Status Viewer & Dashboards - Join Now
• 8 a.m. PT (11 a.m. ET): MonitoringForge.org Intro - Join Now
• 9 a.m. PT (12 p.m. ET): Writing Plugins, Commands and Services in GroundWork Monitor - Join Now
• 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET): GWOS in the Cloud - Join Now
• 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET): How to Install LDAP & Active Directory - Join Now
• 12 p.m. PT (3 p.m. ET): Approaches to Monitoring - Join Now
• 1 p.m. PT (4 p.m. ET): Find Out When Something Goes Wrong - Setting up Notifications - Join Now

Thursday, 10/22
• 7 a.m. PT (10 a.m. ET): Dependencies - Doing it Automatically - Join Now
• 8 a.m. PT (11 a.m. ET): Customizing the Status Viewer - Join Now
• 9 a.m. PT (12 p.m. ET): WMI - What, Why and How - Join Now
• 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET): Interfacing GWM with a CMDB - Join Now
• 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET): Creating a Portlet and Deploying it Inside GroundWork Monitor - Join Now
• 12 p.m. PT (3 p.m. ET): Event Console Review - Join Now
• 1 p.m. PT (4 p.m. ET): Distributed Checks demonstration - Join Now

Posted in: Uncategorized | | No Comments |
Tags: Active Directory, cloud computing, CMBD, commands, Dependencies, Distributed checks, Event Console, Flex, GroundWork Monitor, GWOS, LDAP, monitoring, MonitoringForge, Notifications, Performance Graphs, plugins, Portlet, services, sessions, Status Viewer, Training, WMI

GWOS Slashes Pricing For Introduction to Enterprise Edition

In the vein of doing more with less, GWOS is radically changing GroundWork Monitor Enterprise’s pricing model. To eliminate any hesitation from sampling the advanced functionality and advantages that Enterprise Edition offers, GWOS has lowered the entry price to be $49 per year for monitoring up to 100 devices. This gets the newest, Java based release (6.0 which was GA’d in September) with all of the functionality available for all.

The $49/ year package is called Enterprise Quickstart.

Enterprise Quickstart includes the Enterprise Edition 6.0 software and upgrades, support and online training. You can read more about it here. Quickstart can be purchased online in the GroundWork Exchange.

Flex Program
For deployments who are monitoring over 100 devices, GWOS revolutionized the pricing model to be similar to alternative solutions so comparing the price advantage is easy and on par. Known as the Flex Program, customers now pay for the number of devices that they monitor - on an annual contract. Based on the level of services and the number of devices, the annual cost ranges from $40 - $95 per device.

The Flex Program includes support, upgrades, and a slew of add-on features like Cacti network traffic graphing module, Windows and Linux based Child Servers and GroundWork Distributed Monitoring Agents (GDMA’s).

Flex Program can also be purchased online if the deployment is based in North America. If you are interested in the Flex program and are outside of North America, please contact us or a local Partner.

So far, the feedback on Enterprise Quickstart and Flex has been very positive - like this article from IT Jungle. We hope this hits the mark on winning your business. Please share your comments with us anytime.

Posted in: Uncategorized | | 1 Comment |
Tags: Enterprise Edition, Enterprise Quickstart, Flex Program, GroundWork, GroundWork Exchange, GWOS, Java, Pricing, Support, Training

GroundWork Joins Microsoft System Center Alliance

GroundWork now offers a connector for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, and also joins the MIcrosoft System Center Alliance. GroundWork is the first open source company to participate in the network.

Read about the announcement on Port25 - Narrated by Peter Galli.

Posted in: Uncategorized | | 1 Comment |
Tags: GroundWork Monitor Connector, microsoft, MSFT, open source, System Center Alliance, System Center Manager

ZD Net’s Take: 6.0 Offers New View into Virtual Data Center

Paula Rooney wrote this article about how the GroundWork Monitor’s new Seurat View helps manage data centers. In addition, she discusses the JBoss architecture and GroundWork’s new relationship with Microsoft - as a Microsoft System Center Alliance partner.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=4926

Posted in: Uncategorized | | No Comments |
Tags: Cameron Haight, GroundWork Monitor, JBoss, Microsoft System Center, ZD Net