I found this company through a couple of different programs that I was looking at out. This is there complete Nagios/Cacti/Monitoring solution. It is much more than Nagios. Nagios maybe a portion of the backend, but they have integrated a number of opensource projects into this compilation. I was really taken by this project initially. It had everything I needed. It had the monitoring stuff and performance graphing. I was excited. I installed it and went through the basic configuration and just found it lacking. Maybe I just didn’t have the time to play around with it as much as I wanted. I think though I was put off by the philosophy of the program. They have a Pay program that is built on the opensource program with a lot more features in it. This is not the way we should be doing open source software. I understand and support selling support and services in addition to open source software, but I am put off when a company tries to take an opensource version of a product and limit it because they have a version that they sell.
For example, GW has added this concept of templates that go beyond a nagios template. The template sets up everything about the server, from monitoring to graphing and the like. Then you create the server with a name template and ip address. Done. Easy to add multiple hosts. And hosts can have multiple templates. However, they include 3. Thats it. One is a basic SSH template and I forget the other two. Templates are hard to create as well. I looked through creating one and got confused. Why not include more templates? Because there are tons in the paid version.
Groundwork Monitor uses a lot of Ajax for its web interface. It makes it smooth and enjoyable to use. Setting up hosts was a little complicated, since you weren’t setting up the host for Nagios, but also for Ganglia and other tools that are packed into this compilation.
Overall I liked this package. I don’t think that I will be using it in production, however. I am not sure how much I will follow the development as well. It will be interesting to see where this project ends up in a few years.
One of the other projects they Groundwork owns is called Fruity. Fruity was a configuration tool for Nagios. The author of the tool as recently left and is creating a fork since groundwork is sitting on the tool and not updating it. I am looking forward to see what this fork brings. Fruity looked like a great configuration tool.