Installing GroundWork Monitor Open Source

GroundWork Monitor runs on Linux, and has been tested with Suse SLES 9.x, and with Red Hat ES WS 4 which are our supported platforms. Other distributions may work allright, but should contain the same version of clib, and should support installation by rpm package. Source code is, of course, available as well, for those who wish to build their own packages. We do not provide build scripts, however, as these are specific to the tested distributions, and so are of little value over the rpm itself.

You can download GroundWork Monitor from the GroundWork website, http://www.groundworkopensource.com/downloads. Be sure to check the MD5 sum, and to download the INSTALL document.

GroundWork highly recommends placing the GroundWork Monitor Open Source software on a dedicated server. This ensures adequate performance, especially if there are a large number of devices to monitor via polling. If you would like to investigate scaling the monitoring system up to over approximately 500 devices, you should consider setting up distributed monitoring, or other scaling options.
Hardware changes rapidly these days, but in general one should size the hardware to the application. At a minimum, use the following specification as a guideline.

Recommended Hardware for GroundWork Monitor Open Source

Minimum System Requirements (Hardware spec) – GroundWork machine
Pentium 4 class machine 2.4GHz or higher
2 Gigs of Ram
60Gb HDD

Installation Steps

Once the hardware is deployed, and Linux is installed, the rpm can be loaded. The INSTALL document, available on the GroundWork website, lists the configuration steps necessary for proper installation. GroundWork monitor will not run unless these steps are followed exactly. Note that MySQL is installed with the rpm as a dependent package, but that it will not overwrite or delete you existing MySQL data, even if you remove the GroundWork rpm.

The web interface should function, and the system can be configured.