New version of GroundWork Monitor Powers First Services-Oriented Architecture for Open Source IT Management

May 9, 2007; 02:41 AM
GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (www.groundworkopensource.com), the leader in open source IT Management, today announced the latest release of GroundWork Monitor which includes the first Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) development framework for Open Source IT Management. The company also announced the GroundWork Factory which will leverage the IT Management SOA of GroundWork Monitor Professional to deliver a unique set of services for service level management, as well as a repository of dashboards, profiles, reports, and integration best practices.

“GroundWork Factory enables us to add additional value to the GroundWork platform,” said Ranga Rangachari, CEO of GroundWork Open Source. “In combination with GroundWork Monitor Professional, the GroundWork Factory will become a valuable source of expertise, information, and reusable extensions for our partners, our customers and the community.”

GroundWork Factory has already proven itself via the creation of the first open source monitoring and management software for Oracle 10g. The solution measures a variety of different parameters to gauge the performance and availability of Oracle databases, including cache utilization levels, number of user sessions, table capacity, and resource allocation.

“Increasingly, IT management platforms must be extensible and flexible enough to respond to and enable quick changes in an organization's business environment,” said Michael Cote, analyst at RedMonk. “Currently, we're seeing the application of SOA thinking to create IT management platforms that can fit these needs for rapid change and expandability. Coupled with the innovation advantages that an open source base brings, GroundWork Factory is GroundWork Open Source's answer to this emerging IT management SOA approach.”

SOA improves performance, scalability and interoperability

The adoption of SOA into the latest version of GroundWork Monitor Professional, the company’s flagship open source systems and network monitoring product, has resulted in an unprecedented improvement in both performance and scalability. Benchmarks indicate performance increases and response time improvement of as much as 500%. A single monitoring server can now easily handle hundreds of hosts.

"We needed a flexible monitoring solution that would allow us to gain essential insight into our network," said Jordan Lederman, Director of Systems and Networking at Advance Internet. "GroundWork Monitor Professional was the right choice—it fits the needs of our network, can scale with us as we grow, is easy to configure- and integrates smoothly into our existing infrastructure."

Additionally, a redesigned status viewer console allows operators to gain access to critical information much faster. The new tree-like navigation takes advantage of the latest AJAX technologies to quickly show all server groups, applications, and network elements. Bar graphs provide a quick visual representation of the overall health of servers and services.

“Commonwealth is the second-largest, privately held independent broker/dealer in the nation, and system-uptime and health is mission critical to our business,” said Max Lipschultz, System Engineer at Commonwealth Financial Network. “GroundWork’s open source foundations allow us to peer into any area of our hardware and software assets’ performance, without the cost and delay of a feature request for every new parameter we would like to monitor.”

An annual subscription to GroundWork Monitor Professional is priced at $16,000. GroundWork Monitor Open Source is available free for download at http://www.groundworkopensource.com/downloads. Both versions now support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0.

About GroundWork

San Francisco-based GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (http://www.groundworkopensource.com) is the leader in the fast-growth market for open source IT management software. The company unifies proven open source projects into a complete software solution for monitoring and managing the performance and availability of the entire IT infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of traditional software. A member of the Open Solutions Alliance, GroundWork is dedicated to driving the adoption of comprehensive open source business solutions. Thousands of systems administrators across hundreds of organizations worldwide have downloaded and deployed our products to monitor and manage the performance and availability of over one million systems and network devices. GroundWork customers represent a variety of industries, including education, financial services, government, manufacturing, and high technology. The company is privately held, with investments from Canaan Partners, Mayfield Fund, JAFCO Ventures and SAP Ventures.