Those who know me also know that I have been a Nagios supporter for a while; but have had my share of complains about the solution. Since past few months, I have been hearing/trying out GroundWorks open source solution as it provides a better integrated value offering when compared to Nagios; so did a study that I would like to share with my readers.
Groundworks 5.3 community edition is hosted on enterprise class application server/database, this came as a big relief after using Nagios which had some scalability issues. JBOSS and Mysql have given a good foundation to GroundWorks and provide some really nice Web 2.0 features like AJAX driven views/role driven dashboards etc… Furthermore GWS also provides some really cool reporting features. Note that the reporting functionality is for both realtime and historical information.
Hardware requirements for GWS are pretty straightforward i.e. 4 Gigs of RAM, 3 GHz CPU speed, 160 Gigs of harddrive, etc.. Net net – Nothing earthshaking.
What was really interesting is that GWS had a lot of plug ins incorporated, intuitive UI driven hostgroup/host setup, servicegroup/service setup, dependency control and service metric reporting features. This was a BIG plus and provided value of the shelf… For the existing Nagios users, GWS provides an seamless port over of existing functionality. Whats more is that installation took only 30 minutes!! Well do not confuse installation with ready solution — PLEASE. I am only referring to base solution.
If all of the aforementioned was not enough, the GWS solution provides a feature to discover devices based on ping sweep and tcp layer discovery option as well; Auto discovery for free — Neat!!
So to summarize, GWS community edition turned out to be a very useful time investment due to following reasons:
1) Easy to install 20 minutes of initial setup
2) UI driven hostgroup/host/servicegroup/service/commands/dependencies
3) Historical and Realtime reporting features
4) Auto Discovery via ICMP protocol
5) AJAX driven role based views/dashboards
6) MySql archive
7) Checks for SNMP alarms [passive]
8 ) Active service checks [loads of them]
I would be interested to hear the feedback from others who have used enterprises edition on GWS BSM features provided in enterprise version of the solution.
Hey thanks so much for this great write-up! We’d love to hear what you think of our 6.0 product (http://gwos.com/products/community-edition/) which is even cooler.
Cheers!
Amy Abascal
GWOS
@Amy
Thank you for your comment, Yes, I did check out the GWOS 6.0 solution. I sincerely think GWOS as a solution has a potential to excel with the value contained in a single solution off the shelf. You folks are already a leader in NMS landscape, I think the new BSM capabilities that you have added are rock and take the value offered to the next level.
Good luck and keep reading, I plan to write a follow up post on GWOS soon..
For those who need steps to install
http://www.groundworkopensource.com/wiki/index.php/GroundWork_Developer%27s_Kit_Installation