Application Monitoring

Emeryville, CA—September 20, 2004— Groundwork Open Source Solutions, Inc., a leader in open source-based IT management solutions, today announced the availability of GroundWork Monitor 3, an IT monitoring solution built on an open source platform that enables enterprises to monitor their network and application infrastructures at a fraction of the cost of commercial software alternatives.

GroundWork Monitor leverages the functionality of Nagios, an open source IT monitoring tool, and transforms it into an enterprise-ready IT management solution by adding functional enhancements as well as deployment services and ongoing support. Nagios currently has an estimated 45,000 users worldwide, including companies such as AT&T Wireless, Siemens and Time Warner Cable. Over the past year, GroundWork has deployed previous versions of GroundWork Monitor for 25 companies across a number of industries including technology, manufacturing, construction and government.

“We’re wrapping new functionality, usability enhancements, deployment services, support and training around a widely adopted open source tool,” said Robert Fanini, CEO of GroundWork. “Essentially, we’re doing for Nagios what RedHat has done for Linux.”

Enhanced Functionality in GroundWork Monitor

GroundWork Monitor incorporates Nagios’ availability monitoring capabilities and enhances it with extended functionality and system administration tools, including:

• Application Monitoring that covers standard applications, custom applications and databases
• Performance Monitoring that provides historical views and reporting on systems availability over time
• Configuration Tools that auto-discover infrastructure elements and simplify the configuration and maintenance of the monitoring system
• Insight Reports that give enterprises management and operational-level information necessary to quickly address problems and performance dips while identifying and tracking longer-term trends
• JSR168-Compliant Web Portal-based Interface that provides visibility into infrastructure availability and performance through a variety of displays meaningful to both systems administrators and executive management
• Documentation Library that offers detailed system, design and training materials required for an enterprise monitoring system

GroundWork Monitor Bridges the Services and Support Gap

GroundWork Monitor offers important deployment services including system design, configuration and tuning. Unlike most sophisticated monitoring systems, GroundWork Monitor can be deployed in a matter of days so companies realize value quickly. The solution also features telephone and Web support, software updates and complete documentation. “Historically, the drawbacks of open source tools have included the lack of deployment service, little to no product documentation and limited technical support,” said Fanini. “We’re bridging the gap typically left by open source tools so we can offer a solution that is enterprise-ready.”

Advantages of IT Monitoring With Open Source

Open source-based solutions offer significant advantages over commercial alternatives. Because they are flexible and configurable, enterprises can easily customize and modify source code, building simple but scalable systems while avoiding vendor lock-in. In addition, these solutions provide a lower total cost of ownership—as much as 90% lower than commercial offerings—because the software is free and deployment and management requirements are less complex. “Commercial solutions typically involve six-figure licensing fees, and implementation costs can then run as high as five dollars for every dollar spent on software. Deployments take months—even years—and often leave companies with feature-bloated frameworks that provide too much data, and too little information,” said Fanini.

IT Management: Ripe to Leverage Benefits of Open Source

GroundWork believes the IT management market is ripe to take advantage of the inherent benefits of open source. The success of Linux and Apache illustrate enterprises’ receptivity to open source, and the emergence of middleware and database applications based on open source demonstrate the expansion of open source into other areas of IT. There is also growing support for open source IT monitoring tools among Fortune 500 companies as well as government, non-profit and educational institutions around the world.

GroundWork Monitor 3 runs on Linux and Unix operating systems. It is available as a fully deployed and supported solution and will soon be available as a subscription service.

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.