What's New in GroundWork Monitor 6.2?

GroundWork Monitor 6.2 provides new capabilities for customers monitoring complex environments, particularly those providing monitoring-as-a-service. We are also pleased to include new best practice profiles for Java application containers (JBoss, Tomcat, and IBM Websphere) and an updated profile for VMware ESX, ESXi and vCenter.

• Role-based infrastructure views enable administrators to restrict what users can see based on their organization, expertise, location or job function. Role-based views can provide end-users with the monitoring and performance data they need without receiving notifications or performing complex administration.
• New dashboard customization options include hide drill-down links and improved sort options making GWOS more powerful when used as a NOC heads-up display.
• Extended descriptions and notes can now be associated with monitored objects. The notes, displayed alongside the monitoring information, provide context for end-users and application specialists.
• The GWOS Seurat View for visualizing large environments on a single display has been updated to make it easy to locate unacknowledged problems in the monitored environment. This change enables teams to more effectively triage problems and avoid multiple operators working the same incident.
• Integration with the Webmetrics External Performance Monitoring complements deep server and application monitoring with the end-user perspective on service performance.

A new Java monitoring agent provides deep insight into Java application servers and containers. The new agent provides performance monitoring for any MBean exposed by Java applications including JDBC performance, cache hit-rates and transaction rates. Release 6.2 includes pre-built profiles for JBoss, Tomcat and IBM Websphere.

The VMWare monitoring profile has been revamped for compatability with VMware ESX3 and 4, ESXi and vCenter 4.0. This monitoring profile utilizes the VMWare API to provide the following metrics:

• Host CPU usage across available cores
• Datastore usage, both free space and extents
• Host memory usage
• Host network I/O used
• Running VM count

• Improved input validation within the configuration application.
• Improved layout and appearance of detailed screens in the status viewer including a resizable tree view.
• Default user role names have been prefixed with ‘gw’ for better compatibility with external Identity Servers.
• Improved processing of performance data and fixes for Advanced Performance Reports and State Transition Reports that contain large data-sets.
• Improved validation of configuration files generated in distributed environments using the Monarch Externals feature.
• Improved WSDL for monitoring APIs, making it easier to build portal applications using PHP.