GroundWork Open Source introduces enterprise systems management tools

Open source systems management vendors are going after enterprise turf that was once the exclusive domain of the big four vendors. In January, Hyperic Inc. released version 3.2 of its Hyperic HQ Enterprise Web infrastructure and monitoring product and promptly landed media company CNet Networks Inc. as a customer. And this week GroundWork Open Source Inc. launched GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, network and systems management tools that can support tens of thousands of devices and distributed configurations.

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise targets organizations with thousands of devices to monitor and that have numerous employees – network operations center staff, systems administrators, network engineers and IT managers – who use monitoring tools. The typical target customer has higher performance and scalability requirements, maintains a distributed monitored environment, and needs a fault-tolerant monitoring system.

The low-cost alternative
According to David Dennis, the senior director of product marketing at GroundWork, Monitor Enterprise can cost as much as 80% less than Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView, one of the leading network and systems management tools. And it's not just in licensing costs inherent to open source that make GroundWork a cheaper alternative. "Big systems management vendors charge per node, while we charge a subscription price that covers the management server," Dennis said.

Are enhancements enough?
Steve Brasen, an analyst with Enterprise Management Associates, said that many of GroundWork 5.2's features will resonate with large customers. "Some functionality enhancements – such as improvements to the event console, historical reporting and greater scalability – make [GroundWork 5.2] a much more viable solution for larger enterprise IT implementations, and certainly its price model is very attractive to budget-conscious organizations," he said. But Brasen doesn't see GroundWork as a direct challenge to the big four systems management vendors.

• GroundWork Monitor is certified to run on the following platforms:
  • Intel x86 32-bit and 64-bit
  • AMD x86 32-bit and 64-bit
• GroundWork Monitor is supported on VMware ESX Server
• GroundWork monitoring components require one of the following Linux distributions:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server, 32 or 64-bit
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 32 or 64-bit
  • CentOS 5, 32 or 64-bit
  • CentOS 4, 32-bit
  • Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10, 32 or 64-bit
  • Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 9, 32-bit
• GroundWork also integrates with a number of open source projects, including Nagios, Ganglia, NeDi, Cacti, Nmap, RRDTool, MRTG, MySQL and Network Weathermap.
• GroundWork Monitor ships with profiles for monitoring Linux, Unix, Windows, AIX, HP-UX (operating systems), infrastructure (Citrix, BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, VMware ESX, DNS, LDAP, Cisco), applications (Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Exchange and email) Web servers (Apache, IIS).
• GroundWork Enterprise edition offers a full-range of systems management capabilities including server, device and application monitoring; performance monitoring; reporting and exception analysis; network topology discovery; network mapping; and protocol analysis.
• GroundWork Enterprise edition integrates with tools from third parties including Remedy (help desk); BMC Atrium (CMDB); Tivoli (console); and VMware and BlackBerry (monitors).
• GroundWork Monitor Professional is $16,000 per year for one management server.
• GroundWork Monitor Enterprise starts at $25,000 per year, which includes one management server, one test-and-development server, and two GroundWork University training seats.