GroundWork Offers Early Look at Updated Network Monitoring Application

Open source software vendor GroundWork is looking for some help putting the newest version of its flagship IT monitoring application through its paces in anticipation of its release early next year. A trial edition of GroundWork Monitor Community Edition 5.3 is available for community members who want to get an early look, and David Dennis, senior director of product marketing, says the company would love to get some feedback.

GroundWork Monitor 5.3 includes open source host, service and network monitoring program Nagios 3.0 (both are licensed under GPLv2). "Nagios is one of the most important sub-components of GroundWork Monitor Community Edition. There have been a number of changes in Nagios 3.0 designed to improve its scalability and performance in larger environments," says Dennis.

"While GroundWork Monitor Community Edition can already easily monitor hundreds of devices from a single management server, we hope this number increases even more with the integration of Nagios 3.0. We've also made significant changes to the way GroundWork Monitor is packaged by including software prerequisites and a new graphical installer in a single, self-contained download."

Though some of the advanced monitoring configuration features aren't available in Monitor 5.3 yet, it already includes a wizard-based GUI installer and pre-bundled Java and MySQL. Its unified packaging allows for single-download installation on all supported Linux distros, including RHEL, CentOS, and Novell SLES.

Dennis says, "We're also intending to do performance tuning before the GA release. The new capabilities we're adding to GroundWork Monitor Professional and Enterprise in release 5.3 include new service-level reports; these will be part of a beta program for current GroundWork Monitor subscribers."

If you're interested in checking out this pre-release and giving GroundWork some feedback, sign up to attend a free Webcast on November 18, or just head directly to the download page for installation and usage instructions.