GroundBreaker News, March 2007
To view this online, go here.

Technology Insight by Craig Thomas »
Featured Customer: Ingenuity Systems »
March Tool Tip: How to Build a Dashboard »
Community News by Peter Mui »

Download GroundWork Monitor Open Source 5.1 alpha

Join Us April 4 for an Open Source Monitoring Best Practices Webinar

Hello!

As usual our developers and partners are busy as ever. Tuesday we released the Oracle 10g Extension for GroundWork Monitor Professional coded by DSP, a UK-based Oracle and GroundWork reseller. Earlier this month we also released an alpha of GroundWork Monitor Open Source 5.1 (GWMOS 5.1). Check it out and let us know what you think. We'd love to hear from you.

If you register when you download GWMOS 5.1 you'll be entered into a drawing for a Nabaztag Wifi Smart Rabbit from ThinkGeek. The rabbit integrates with GroundWork Monitor and comes with a "notify by rabbit" method so your bunny can alert you about problems on your network before your customers do! You can even increase your chances of winning by participating in testing or being active on the forums.

March saw a flurry of activity with Novell BrainShare 2007 and Red Hat's RHEL 5 launch. Red Hat also announced a new online marketplace, Red Hat Exchange (RHX), which is scheduled to go live later this month that GroundWork is proud to be a part of.

I hope to see you virtually at this coming Wednesday's Webinar, "Open Source Network Monitoring — How to Implement in Mixed Environments." Thomas Stocking, co-Founder of GroundWork and Technical Evangelist will run through the planning, design, implementation and calibration phases of a GroundWork Monitor Open Source deployment. If you haven't registered for the series yet, be sure to do so today!

Sincerely,

Eden Hensley,
Director of Marketing Communications and The GroundBreaker Editor

GROUNDWORK Open Source, Inc.
139 Townsend Street, Suite 100
San Francisco, CA 94107-1946
www.groundworkopensource.com

P.S. If you missed the first Webinar, it's available for on-demand viewing from our website. Let me know what topics you'd like to see covered in a future Webinar or GroundBreaker Tool Tip.

Technology Insight by Craig Thomas:
Wisdom and Management

We have all heard the old chestnut, "the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from." Standards make for a pretty dry topic, but open standards implemented with open source bring powerful benefits to mid-market systems and network management customers. I'll get off this standards bandwagon soon, but just wanted to shed some light on a couple more for now.

In the past couple of Technology Insights columns, the subject of Service Modeling Language (SML) has been a common theme. From the SML website (http://www.serviceml.org):

The SML specification is used to model complex IT services and systems, including their structure, constraints, policies, and best practices. [...] SML will allow for the creation of best practices and policies that automate the services' validation, development, operations, updates and end-of-life - the full lifecycle.

SML, then, allows for the modeling of services and systems and policies and practices. It enables software to automate the full lifecycle.

But how does the software that understands SML make the systems and services conform to the model? How do the managed systems and services describe themselves so that the planned state versus actual state can be compared?

Enter a pair of standards: WSDM, pronounced "wisdom", and WS-Management, pronounced "WS-Man".

Read the rest on our website.

Featured Customer: Ingenuity Systems

"Before we installed GroundWork Monitor Professional, we used the OpenNMS tool to monitor the health of our IT investment—which was like trying to map the human genome with a magnifying glass. But with the GroundWork software suite, we have all the tools we need to keep our services and operations running around the clock."
— Richard Farley, Director of IT, Ingenuity Systems

Ingenuity Systems is not only known for their biological software offerings; they also own the worlds largest database of curated biology connections—millions of models that show interactions between proteins, genes, complexes, cells, drugs and tissues. Providing subscribers around-the-clock access to this library requires a hefty IT Investment, including a 25 TB storage array made of hundreds of Linux and Unix nodes.

For many years, Ingenuity IT Director, Richard Farley, and his team used stand-alone OpenNMS to keep tabs on their IT ecosystem, but the application was lacking the ability to track individual infrastructure components. The homegrown scripts they added to make up for this simply did not scale to their needs.

GroundWork Monitor Professional provided the solution they needed. Performance statistics ensure less downtime and better capacity planning. Advanced alert capbilities help them prioritize problems. Open Source licensing gives them total ownership and flexibility to customize. And GroundWork's subscription is one tenth the cost of proprietary packages.

Download this and other case studies on our website.

March Tool Tip: How to Build a Dashboard

Showing only a portion of your monitored infrastructure for designated viewers has applications in the MSP market and in enterprises where responsibilities are divided for security reasons. Groundwork Monitor Professional has capability for this type of restriction, utilizing the Dashboard Builder application. The Dashboard Builder includes options upon saving the finished dashboard for setting permissions by user, group, or role, as defined in the Administration section of the portal.

These classifications can be applied to an individual dashboard as well as to the portal itself. For this function, it is useful to have defined a role that has access only to the Dashboard Reader application as shown here.

Read the rest of the March Tool Tip.

Community News by Peter Mui

Continuing our never-ending quest to bring monitoring to the masses, GroundWork has been amping up its outreach efforts, attending regional user group events far and wide. Over 150 brave souls tackled the snowy environs of Grand Rapids, MI for the Western Michigan Novell Users Group meeting in late January, where GroundWork gave a presentation on how small and mid-sized businesses should approach setting up an initial monitoring installation. Recent appearances at the Southen California Linux Expo (SCALE) in L.A., and San Diego's March Mingle gave us opportunities to interact with users and get some excellent feedback.

Meanwhile, here in downtown San Francisco we've been able to host monthly BayLISA Monitoring SIG Meetings where we share best practices in IT monitoring. We're going to put some web based resources together to share remotely what we've been discussing, so look for that coming soon in the community section of our website. And if you're in San Francisco on the second Wednesday of the month feel free to participate in the SIG and partake in the pizza and snacks!

By Peter Mui, Open Source Community Advocate

Find out more about the GroundWork Community.

Upcoming Events

Open Source Network Monitoring:
How to Implement in Mixed Environments
April 7, 2007 — Webinar
For more information, visit our website
BayLISA Monitoring SIG VI: What Are You Using?
April 11, 2007 — San Francisco, CA
For more information, visit www.groundworkopensource.com/community/monitoring-sig.html
LinuxFest Northwest 2007
April 28-29, 2007 — Bellingham, WA
For more information, visit www.linuxfestnorthwest.org
IT 360º
April 30 - May 2, 2007 — Toronto, Canada
For more information, visit our www.it360.ca

More events.

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