GroundWork Delivers Open Source System Monitoring Tool

Published: February 21, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

GroundWork, a maker of IT monitoring software that is aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses that cannot afford and do not need the functionality of a data center-class IT monitoring tool announced last week that it has put out a beta of an open source tool called, appropriately enough, GroundWork Open Source. The company also divulged its plans to create a commercially supported version of the product.

According to Tony Barbagallo, vice president of marketing at GroundWork, mid-sized companies that have a fair number of servers are often in need of a sophisticated tool like Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, IBM's Tivoli, or Computer Associates' Unicenter, but these tools are overkill. And while open source tools like Nagios are very popular with the Linux crowd, which loves command line interfaces and the nearly infinite customization the Nagios tool offers, these two aspects of Nagios make it unattractive to customers who are used to more graphical tools and who do not want to have to cope with the malleability of the tool. They just want to log in and see what part of the IT infrastructure is not working right.

So this, says Barbagallo, is why GroundWork has taken the Nagios 2.0 release, which was put out only three weeks ago, and given it a graphic front end (which uses PHP) as well as a MySQL database that contains monitoring profiles for popular open source programs. Straight Nagios doesn't have a library of database of plug-ins for other programs, and it certainly doesn't let you create your own policies for your own applications. GroundWork also has another neat feature--it has built-in clustering, so you can mirror the system monitoring servers you create.

Of course, if you want to get the full-featured version of the GroundWork superset of the Nagios tool, then you need to buy GroundWork Professional 4.5, which includes a license for one year and tech support. Barbagallo says that a single Linux server running the GroundWork tool can easily monitor up to 500 devices on the network. The GroundWork tool has been certified on Novell SUSE and Red Hat Linuxes, and the company does not have any plans to deliver a Windows-only or Unix-only version of the tool. GroundWork can, however, monitor Windows, Unix, and NetWare servers as well as Linux servers. In fact, Barbagallo says that only about 15 of the 100 customers it has for the software are Linux/Unix-only shops, and only about 20 are dominated by Windows; the remaining 65 percent of its customers have a mix of platforms.