GroundWork Announces Open Source User Interface for Nagios; GroundWork Status Viewer Gives Nagios Users Faster, More Intuitive Access to Monitoring Data.EMERYVILLE, Calif. -- GroundWork Open Source Solutions, Inc., a leader in open source IT management solutions, announced today at LinuxWorld the availability of GroundWork Status Viewer, a fast, scalable open source interface tool designed to improve the visualization Using the computer to convert data into picture form. The most basic visualization is that of turning transaction data and summary information into charts and graphs. Visualization is used in computer-aided design (CAD) to render screen images into 3D models that can be viewed from all and manageability of monitoring data from Nagios, a popular open source IT monitoring tool. GroundWork Status Viewer is the company's second open source project after GroundWork Monitor Architect, a configuration tool for Nagios launched in June. GroundWork develops, integrates and enhances best-of-breed open source software to deliver comprehensive open source IT monitoring solutions that improve IT infrastructure availability and performance -- at a fraction of the cost of commercial software. "GroundWork Status Viewer provides substantial enhancements to the robust capabilities of Nagios," said Ranga Rangachari, CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of GroundWork. "With GroundWork Status Viewer, the thousands of companies that rely on Nagios for IT monitoring now have a highly configurable and scalable user interface." Nagios and Nagios add-ons have had more than 700,000 downloads since 2001. Until now, Nagios users have been limited to an interface that provides only limited views into monitoring data, and that cannot easily scale to display the status over very large networks. GroundWork Status Viewer complements GroundWork Monitor Architect (Monarch A data capture program from Datawatch Corporation, Chelmsford, MA, (www.datawatch.com), that is used to transfer data from mainframe and minicomputer reports to the PC. It uses report files that contain data ready to print. ), GroundWork's first open source tool designed to ease the configuration of Nagios. "After testing GroundWork Status Viewer, we now anticipate deploying it into our production environment of nearly 1,700 hosts and 2,300 managed services An umbrella term for third-party monitoring and maintaining of computers, networks and software. The actual equipment may be inhouse or at the third-party's facilities, but the "managed" implies an ongoing effort; for example, making sure the equipment is running at a certain quality ," said Craig A. Hancock, a Monitoring Technician See PC technician and software technician. at Brigham Young University's Operations Center The facility or location on an installation, base, or facility used by the commander to command, control, and coordinate all crisis activities. See also base defense operations center; command center. . "GroundWork Status Viewer offers a much more scalable front end for Nagios, giving everyone from our engineers to upper-management a simple and unified view of our network." New Views Into the IT Infrastructure With GroundWork Status Viewer's interface, Nagios users now have access to a number of critical views into their company's IT infrastructure. NetView offers a high level view into the overall network infrastructure so users can see aggregated status of all services, applications, servers, networks and end user performance as they near warning and breach thresholds. TroubleView gives users both at-a-glance and drill-down views into all the hosts and services that require immediate attention. And FilterView gives users the ability to define criteria for custom status views on groups of monitored devices or services. These features give Nagios users more visibility and control over their IT infrastructure, and faster access to information about problems in the network. For companies with large networks of over 500 managed devices, GroundWork Status Viewer transforms Nagios into a scalable, enterprise monitoring system. Built on Open Source Technology GroundWork Status Viewer relies on GroundWork-developed technology that extracts, normalizes and stores monitoring status data in a separate MySQL database, and makes the data available via an application programming interface (API (Application Programming Interface) A language and message format used by an application program to communicate with the operating system or some other control program such as a database management system (DBMS) or communications protocol. ). The interface itself is written using PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) A scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages. With syntax from C, Java and Perl, PHP code is embedded within HTML pages for server side execution. , a widely used open source scripting language A high-level programming, or command, language that is interpreted (translated on the fly) rather than compiled ahead of time. A scripting, or script, language may be a general-purpose programming language or it may be limited to specific functions used to augment the running of an , resulting in much higher performance than is possible with Nagios' current interface built using Common Gateway Interface (CGI CGI in full Common Gateway Interface. Specification by which a Web server passes data between itself and an application program. Typically, a Web user will make a request of the Web server, which in turn passes the request to a CGI application program. ) scripts. Licensing and Availability GroundWork Status Viewer is currently available under the GPL See GNU General Public License. 1. GPL - General Purpose Language. 2. GPL - ["A Sample Management Application Program in a Graphical Data-driven Programming language", A.L. Davis et al, Digest of Papers, Compcon Spring 81, Feb 1981, pp. 162-167]. open source software license at GroundWork's Web site (http://www.itgroundwork.com/products/gw_status-viewer.html) and at SourceForge (http://www.sourceforge.net). About GroundWork GroundWork Open Source Solutions, Inc. (http://www.itgroundwork.com) provides open source software and solutions for network and systems monitoring and management. With GroundWork solutions, enterprises leverage the flexibility and value of open source to achieve enterprise-level availability, performance and operational efficiency at a fraction of the cost of traditional software. GroundWork investors include Mayfield and Canaan Partners. The company is based in Emeryville, CA. |
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