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What is GroundWork Monitor?
GroundWork Monitor is a comprehensive IT availability and performance monitoring solution that integrates open source and proprietary technologies together under a unified web services portal. It allows you to leverage the advantages of open source while simultaneously preserving existing investments in legacy management tools. Its open platform delivers enterprise-class network, system, application, and cloud monitoring solutions, and and features a flexible architecture that supports custom configurations and custom reporting.
GroundWork Monitor Portal Pages
GroundWork Monitor applications are categorized along with descriptions:
Configuring |
Monitoring |
Reporting |
Other |
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Auto Discovery allows administrators to automatically add and coordinate network resources with the GroundWork Monitor Foundation configuration database. Auto Discovery discovers all devices visible on your local subnet, and automatically apply a set of service checks with properly set thresholds. Configuration is a web-based tool that eases and speeds up the configuration of the monitoring system. Includes the options: Performance - an option to tailor the performance graphs displayed from data gathered by Nagios; Maintenance - allows for device, service, and externals cleanup and closing of events; NoMa - a notifications and alerts manager for Nagios; Configuration Reports - which shows you the hosts with their contained commands, and all hostgroups with their services; and Downtimes and Recurring Downtimes to manage hostgroups, servicegroups and hosts downtimes. |
Dashboards can be used as a monitoring starting point for system users who wish to see a quick real-time status overview of data and then drill-down into the various sub applications when needed. The Dashboards tab provides standard system dashboard. Webmetrics is integrated within GroundWork Monitor Dashboards to offer web performance management monitoring. The My GroundWork tab enables users to define personal dashboards. Event Console is a data-rich event monitoring console which provides a detailed, at-a-glance view of event and status data. Status is a fast, scalable open source interface tool designed to improve the visualization and manageability of monitoring data from Nagios. Views launches the NagVis a presentation tool for the information which is gathered by Nagios and transferred using supported backends including GroundWork Monitor. GroundWork NMS offers integrated open source toolkits including; Ntop, NeDi, Cacti, and Weathermap. Nagios option provides full access to the Nagios monitoring interface. |
GroundWork Reports: Availability, Event, Performance, and Status Insight Reports: Performance View, Alerts, Notifications, Outages, SLA Management Custom Reports: Create, modify, generate, and distribute custom monitoring reports using the BIRT Report Designer |
Administration is used to define and configure system users, including managing passwords and constructing roles. In addition, administration for Foundation, Views, CustomGroups, Cloud Hub for VMware , and GroundWork License. Resources enables access to product documentation, the GroundWork Connect support portal, GroundWork Developer Portal (GDK) which includes code samples, development and environment tools, API reference, and Wiki. |
JBoss Portal for GroundWork Monitor
GroundWork Monitor 6.x and beyond utilizes the JBoss Portal which provides an open source and standards-based environment for hosting and serving a portal's Web interface, and publishing, managing, and customizing its content. The JBoss Portal consists of portals, portal pages, and portlets.
- Logged In Username - The Welcome text displays the name of the user that has logged in to the portal, (e.g. admin, operator, user).
- Global Links - These links provide easy access to system-wide features:
- New Window - Opens a new browser window and duplicates the existing window currently open.
- My Preferences - Opens the User Profile portlet instance enabling editing of the logged in users profile.
- Help - Opens Bookshelf, the online help system, in a secondary browser window.
- Log Out - Logs user out of the system and returns the user to GroundWork Monitor log in screen.
- Portal Pages - The main portal pages are accessible with the primary navigation. The default page is Dashboards and is displayed upon login. Dashboards is a personal portal page displaying shared system dashboards. The My GroundWork page allows users to customize a dashboard view of the portal. Users are able to add portal pages and individual portlets into their personal dashboards and save their dashboards for use in future portal sessions.
- Secondary Navigation - Many of the portal pages (primary options) when selected display a secondary navigation. Additionally, within various pages in the system tabs are used to enable users to open one or more views simultaneously. Specifically in the Status application a user can click an object from a left navigation tree and display the objects information in a tab. There are other layout and navigational tools used throughout the system, each discussed as we review the individual applications.