GroundWork Monitor 6.0 Sneak Peek
More than a year in the making, GroundWork Monitor 6.0 combines a thoroughly revamped look-and-feel with a new JBoss-based development platform.
Whether you're new to monitoring tools and looking for great ease of use, or a power user who values customizability, GroundWork Monitor 6.0 offers something for you.
GroundWork Monitor 6.0 offers:
- Advanced security and customization — The highly extensible Portal Interface enables fine-grained, role-based access controls and a high level of customization.
- Increased productivity and quick troubleshooting — The Status Viewer, redesigned based on customer feedback, provides availability and performance data in a single view – aiding troubleshooting and reducing time needed to investigate issues.
- Enhanced tools for large deployments — New Features in GroundWork Monitor Enterprise make large–scale, complex data easy to review.
- Tailor–made monitoring — You can easily create and tailor to your specific needs as many personal and role–based dashboards as you want.
- Quick migration and easier integration — Technical changes provide new extension points, new APIs, and tight integration with authentication systems as well as assuring fast migration from Nagios and earlier versions of GroundWork Monitor.
Portal Interface
The revamped GroundWork Monitor 6.0 user interface, based on JBoss Portal, is highly extensible and offers robust API support and documentation as well as secured SOAP APIs for accessing monitoring data.
The portal–based interface enables new customization and user-permission options, including page–level, feature–level, and configuration–level control.
Single sign–on has been preserved, enabling efficient access through the portal interface to existing applications, such as Monarch, Reporting, Event Console, and the Network Management Suite.
Status Viewer
With the GroundWork Monitor 6.0 Status Viewer, you can:
- Immediately view status information about a variety of objects in search results.
- Reduce information overload by applying pre-built filters to remove irrelevant host and service data.
- Instantaneously know how well you are meeting your service level with automatic availability calculations.
- Browse, summarize, and navigate by service groups, enabling service-oriented administration.
- Quickly navigate the application with context links based on dependencies and relationships between systems.
GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition – New Features
Only available in GroundWork Monitor 6.0 Enterprise Edition Status Viewer:
- Embedded, context-sensitive event console — Access performance, status, and event information in one view
- "Seurat View" — Displays summaries of the status of hundreds of hosts and services. Especially useful for administrators who must monitor a large number of devices in a single, high-resolution display.
- Status History — Recent host and service state changes displayed both at-a-glance and in drill-down views
Dashboards
Out-of-the box, GroundWork Monitor 6.0 includes a monitoring system dashboard. Using the GroundWork Monitor 6.0 Personal Dashboard Editor, you can generate a number of tailor-made, customized dashboards that only you can view. As an example, you could quickly create a line-of-business dashboard to include availability calculations and performance metrics and then embed existing Web applications into it.
Administrators have global dashboard and application editing options that permit creation of role-based, shared dashboards. They can apply fine-grained security controls to define who can access these dashboards.
Technical Changes
Technical changes include new APIs that enable UI extension and Web Services monitoring and configuration. Perl-based APIs (donated by dass IT GmbH ) permit automatic configuration changes via scripts and external programs. New extension points integrate existing Web applications into dashboards and the Status Viewer.
New monitoring profiles, auto-discovery rules, checks, throughput measures, and a new monitoring system dashboard assure improved monitoring in GroundWork Monitor.
Available on the GroundWork Developer's Wiki portal, augmented developer documentation includes the new GroundWork Developers Kit that provides Web Services documentation and sample applications (in both PHP and Java) for extending the GroundWork Monitor application platform.
