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Second in a three-part series, guest blogger and ;login: author, Matthew Sacks, presents his review of Open Source Enterprise Monitoring Tools. Matthew looked at Zenoss, GroundWork, and Hyperic. Next up, GroundWork.

Why we tested these:
There are a number of open source monitoring tools out there boasting large feature-sets and powerful management utilities that go beyond the traditional MRTG, Cacti, or Nagios installation. These monitoring tools utilize these classic open source utilities and build on them to cultivate a full-features enterprise-class monitoring solution. Although these are not the only monitoring tools out there, they are the key players in the open source enterprise monitoring arena.

What was rated:
– Installation process
– Ease of configuration
– Number of features
– Documentation

And now on to the review: GroundWork

Overview:
GroundWork Monitor Community Edition [www.groundworkopensource.com] is an enterprise monitoring suite that is based on the open source Nagios project. It leverages the powerful network and systems monitoring of Nagios and the graphing power of Cacti and MRTG.

Installation:
The installation process of GroundWork was not exactly smooth, to put it nicely. Although the configuration was not difficult to implement, it did require a lot of manual steps in order to get it running. GroundWork ships with a graphical installer script that guides the installation; however, even with the installer script there is a lot of manual configuration in between configuration screens. Once installed, configuration becomes a snap.

Configuration:
The first thing noticed about GroundWork is an excellent user interface. Navigation through the different interfaces of GroundWork is intuitive and pleasant. The auto-discovery feature is simple to use and fast. Once a discovery is executed, the items discovered appear for modifying details and for inputting them into the GroundWork database for monitoring. GroundWork has done an excellent job at layering an interface for setting up the underlying Nagios configuration. Configuration of services, profiles, and hosts is relatively simple while leveraged with a fine-grained level of monitoring detail. The configuration of the underlying Nagios engine has been simplified in GroundWork and it is easy to configure new services, profiles, hosts, and alerts.

Features:
GroundWork’s strong point is fine-grained monitoring metrics for individual services, hosts, and performance metrics that the Nagios engine provides. The reporting application in GroundWork is easy to use and can generate reports based on all hosts in the network and allows for a quick overview of host health in a network with many servers in it. The documentation and help section found in the GroundWork application was well written and organized. The performance graphing utility included needs a bit of work. Extending the metrics, which it can collect, takes a bit of work through the performance configuration administration.

Conclusion:
GroundWork provides a beautiful graphical interface for configuring a Nagios-based enterprise monitor. It simplifies the process, and adds an easy to use interface for configuring a complex and fine-grained application such as Nagios. GroundWork has done an excellent job at taming this normally configuration-intensive beast. GroundWork allows for advanced monitoring of a large network. Nagios is heavily configuration-intensive and GroundWork has made this process much easier with their beautiful interface. GroundWork is the most flexible of the monitoring tools in this review allowing much granularity in terms of what can be modified within the configuration and the application itself.

GroundWork Community Edition is available here.

About the author:
Matthew Sacks works as a systems administrator. His focus is network, systems, and application performance tuning.