Open Source Integration Platform

Emeryville, CA — September 12, 2005 — GroundWork Open Source Solutions, Inc, a leader in open source IT operations management solutions, announced the availability of GroundWork Foundation, an open source integration platform that enables companies to combine a variety of open source tools into a single IT operations management solution. With GroundWork Foundation, data from disparate open source tools, such as Nagios, MRTG, SNMPTT and Syslog-ng, can be accessed via real time status views, reports and dashboards — from a single user interface.

"Today's IT environments often are made up of disparate, open source and proprietary management tools--each targeted for a single requirement. These tools were not designed to work as part of a larger system and don't easily integrate with each other," said Ranga Rangachari, CEO of GroundWork. "GroundWork Foundation provides an open source platform into which companies can integrate and extend the tools of their choice, reducing the time and cost associated with managing multiple, uncoordinated IT monitoring and management tools."

How GroundWork Foundation Works

GroundWork Foundation gives IT staff a flexible and extensible means of combining IT monitoring and management data from open source tools, applications or proprietary systems into a common data model. GroundWork Foundation's interface layer APIs enable users to build status displays, reports and dashboards that access this data, providing a centralized, single point of visibility and control of the IT infrastructure.

Features of GroundWork Foundation

• Standardized User Interfaces and APIs: APIs available with GroundWork Foundation allow presentation layer programs to query the GroundWork Foundation database by object or data type. Separate API libraries are available for Perl, PHP and Java programs, enabling users to build their own custom user interfaces.
• Customizable Presentation Formats: Customizable presentation formats allow integrated, normalized data to be retrieved and displayed in real time or in historic views, reports and operational dashboards.
• Customizable Adapters: GroundWork Foundation allows for the development of adapters to integrate and normalize any type of monitoring data--whether SNMP, polled or log file data. Normalized data is stored in a common database for retrieval.
• Integration of Third Party Systems: Data from commercial monitoring systems can also be integrated into GroundWork Foundation, enabling IT staff to consolidate the best of open source and proprietary monitoring and management tools into a single application.

GroundWork Foundation has been in development and testing for over a year. GroundWork's recently released open source project, GroundWork Status Viewer, a user interface for Nagios, relies on GroundWork Foundation technology to extract, process and display Nagios monitoring data. The company's flagship product, GroundWork Monitor, also leverages GroundWork Foundation technology to provide an enterprise-class, integrated IT monitoring solution based on Nagios and other leading open source tools.

Licensing and Availability

GroundWork Foundation is currently available under the GPL open source software license at GroundWork's web site and at SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gwfoundation ).

About GroundWork Open Source Solutions

GroundWork Open Source Solutions, Inc. (www.groundworkopensource.com) develops, integrates and enhances leading open source software to deliver comprehensive open source IT monitoring solutions. With GroundWork solutions, enterprises leverage the flexibility and low cost of open source tools to achieve enterprise-level availability, performance and operational efficiency at a fraction of the cost of commercial software. GroundWork is based in Emeryville, Calif. and its investors include Mayfield and Canaan Partners.