GroundWork Architecture
The GroundWork Monitor uses a standards based, open architecture to deliver a proven, stable and scalable systems and network monitoring platform. By integrating and extending well-known open source monitoring solutions with a scalable and powerful normalization and storage engine GroundWork Monitor scales to meet the demands of Enterprise-wide deployments.
Monitoring is one part of the IT operations toolbox; GroundWork Monitor is designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing tools and processes for asset management, incident management, change control or even other monitoring solutions. By delivering an open platform for monitoring technologies, end-users and customers can tailor GroundWork Monitor to fit their exact needs.
These tiers provide the overall structure that enables fluid interaction between the multiple open source projects leveraged in each tier.
Instrumentation tier
Provides scalable and flexible data collection services to ensure wide coverage for hardware, operating systems, networks, applications and services. This tier is extremely flexible and customizable – to best fit how your environment needs to be monitored.
Scheduled checks - Get availability and performance measurement information for the widest selection of infrastructure available via the Nagios® scheduling engine and plug-in system.
Monitoring agents - Agent and proxy based monitoring tools that include NRPE, NSClient, the GroundWork Linux Child and GroundWork Windows Child Servers.
Network performance - Get network performance measurement with the Cacti Project, ideal for large network environments.
Network traffic analysis - The top project add-on provides detailed traffic analysis using NetFlow and sFlow.
Network discovery - The NeDi project add-on discovers the network topology and connected devices. Automated network discovery dramatically reduces the incidence of alarm storms in complex environments since system dependencies are automatically configured.
SNMP traps - Net-snmp and snmptt projects included in the Enterprise Edition provide SNMP polling and trap processing for devices and operating systems.
End-user performance - Get application performance from an external user perspective by integrating the e-Valid synthetic transaction monitoring solution to combine internal measurements with external experience in a single view. iScoute can be integrated to trace business processes from an end-user experience perspective.
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) - Windows Child Server or GDMA provide deep monitoring coverage for Windows desktops, servers and applications.
Grids and clusters - The Ganglia with Groundwork Monitor add-on provides granular measurement of a wide range of OS-level performance statistics in a flexible yet scalable manner.
Normalization
Standardizes the format and representation of data from different sources, enabling the state and persistence engines to make inferences and decisions based on information from different sources.
State engine - Provides efficient scheduling, retry logic and suppression of spurious messages based on the configured monitoring environment. The state engine supports higher-level decision making by combining incoming events from different devices and timeframes into logical state changes that are actionable by operations staff.
De-duplication - Consolidates related information and summarizing performance measurements for reporting and historical trending, ensuring the application can monitor tens of thousands of devices.
Persistence engine - Built upon MySQL Enterprise and RRDs (Round-Robin Databases) provides storage for status information, current performance measurements and historical performance information.
Portal tier
The portal tier provides authentication and role-based access control to the GroundWork Monitor user interface. The interface includes state-based, event-based, and report-based views of the monitored environment and offers extensive customization and configuration features to enable self-service by a wide selection of users.
The portal based approach allows complementary applications to be incorporated into a single-pane-of-glass for operations without extensive integration or customization. The portal tier also provides access to the user interface of the underlying Open Source projects, reducing the need to retrain users who are already familiar with those tools.
Personal dashboards - End-users create customized views on key measurements and infrastructure components or application-specific dashboards organized by geography or a business process or some combination of each.
Event view - Displays recent events in a time sequence with extensive filtering capabilities. Drill-down into detailed views is included as is a standard API for integrating related systems such as incident and ticket management software.
State view - Correlates the current state and performance of servers, applications, services, network devices and operating systems with the ability to acknowledge problems, perform root-cause analysis and reschedule checks from a single page.
Configuration - Standardizes various monitoring components using a single web-based interface. May be applied manually by an administrator, or automatically by discovery rules or programmatically via the configuration API.
Actions - Pass actions through "hooks" from the monitoring system in the state and event views and external systems including CMDBs, asset management tools, ticketing systems and run-books. Take advantage of pre-built Groundwork Exchange extensions, or create your own extensions in house by also leveraging the Developer Portal and Development Kit.
Administration - The user, role and permissions model ensures appropriate and controlled access by all users in the organization. Integrates with existing LDAP or ActiveDirectory implementation.
Reports - GroundWork Monitor includes ready-to-run reports for availability management, service management, capacity planning and performance management. BIRT reports designer is included for new report creation and customization.
