Configuring GroundWork Monitor

What can you monitor with GroundWork Monitor? Pretty much anything that can return a value. Most people start with a simple "host alive" or ping check confirming that a device is up and running. From there, you can check hardware health (e.g. how full a disk is), network integrity (e.g. is a link working), application status (e.g. how many transactions a database is handling), to excruciating levels of detail: it mostly depends on what you need to monitor and how much detail you need about it.

GroundWork Monitor includes an autodiscovery feature that sets up simple ping checks on all your local machines automatically. The VMWare version monitors three public websites and the GroundWork Monitor server itself as soon as they start up.

Configuring Monitoring Alerts

How do you find out when something's amiss? Typically, you set threshold values for the services you're monitoring, and if a service exceeds a threshold value, that triggers an event. How you handle the event is up to you: you can ignore it, trigger a notification, launch a script to attempt to further query or restart the service, even wait for it to happen multiple times before acting.

Additional Downloads to Enhance your Monitoring

GroundWork offers downloads of IT monitoring-related enhancements and improvements we’ve contributed back to the Open Source community. Here are some of the more popular Community Contributions:

WMI Plugins

There are large numbers of WMI classes on Windows hosts: the WMI plugin package can be used to retrieve almost any parameter of interest in the default WMI namespace. [ download ]

HP OpenView Event Handler

This HP OpenView (HPOV) Event Handler takes the output of a Nagios®* monitoring system and feeds it into HP OpenView. [ download ]

Ganglia Integration Module

The Ganglia Integration Module allows GroundWork Monitor operator views, dashboards reports, notifications and configuration tools to be applied to Ganglia data. [ download ]

NSCAfe

The Nagios Service Check Acceptor Forwarding Engine (NSCAfe) can be used as a direct substitute for the standard NSCA addon, providing significant additional functionality useful in monitoring large installations. [ download ]

* Nagios is a registered trademark of Nagios Enterprises