The bMighty Blog -- Management

GroundWork became the latest open source supplier to deliver a more powerful system. The GroundWork Monitor manages thousands of devices and is designed to help network operations center staff, systems administrators, and network engineers.

Traditionally, network and systems management tools have been complex, expensive, and difficult to implement. That’s because network and systems management is a complicated area, one that often requires a great deal of specialization and customization. Recently, a number of vendors have been delivering open source systems that ameliorate some of those problems.

Low cost is a big attraction with open source products. GroundWork said its system is priced as much as 80 percent less than traditional management tools from vendors, like Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. The latest release includes new features, such as auto-discovery/auto-configuration; a high speed, low latency event console; new enterprise performance reports, and updates to the software’s dashboard functionality.

Though inexpensive, many of the open source tools have been able to work only with small networks. GroundWork Monitor 5.2 features a modular design that supports distributed, high capacity, highly available environments. In this release of GroundWork, the product’s monitoring throughput has been improved by a factor of 5x, so it can oversee up to 10,000 servers.

GroundWork sells three versions of its management system. The GroundWork Monitor Community Edition is designed for small and medium businesses and is available as a free download. Network and systems management has been a thorn in the side of many small and medium business IT managers. The emergence of new tools, such as Ground Work, promises to offer them help in overseeing their ever growing, extremely complex web of devices, so it may be worth it to check out a tool like the GroundWork Monitor line.

How much open source software does your company work with? What have your experiences been? Does the low price of enterprise management tools appeal to you? Have any of you had any experience with the GroundWork line?

Spotlight on Solutions

(Sponsored By Cisco)