Groundwork Support Forum

[rruttimann]

GroundWork Foundation Milestone 2 Release is ready to download from the SourceForge site: http://gwfoundation.sf.net

GroundWork Foundation is an IT management data abstraction layer and development platform. Foundation 1.1 has been enhanced to integrate more diverse data sources into a single data store. This was achieved by introducing properties for describing the data points instead of using database fields for each measurement. The APIs and the existing feeders are backward compatible with previous versions.

The Foundation data model allows the integration of any state, event, and performance data, independent of the Monitoring Application that produces it. This offers the possibility to store data for additional systems, including open source and commercial monitoring systems, databases, and even hardware, such as detectors or sensors. It also allows the integration of Application Monitoring data known as MBeans.

The current release includes the following enhancements and features:

* Binary distribution for Java 1.4 and Java 1.5. No need to compile
from source; just install configure and use it! For detailed
instructions see the BINARY-INSTALL.txt included in the package.
* Administration Adapter that allows configuration of the system at run
time through data feeds
* Event message consolidation. Similar messages are consolidated
depending on criteria set by the user instead of creating a new
entry for each event.
* Upgrade to version 3.1 of Hibernate, an Object/relational
persistence tool. The latest version improves the performance over
previous releases, and is EJB 3.0 compliant
* Better integration into the Spring framework. All adapters are now
configurable through Spring assemblies.
* Tutorial on how to create an adapter that plugs into the
Foundation Framework. The tutorial shows how to create an adapter
for SNMPTrap messages. The tutorial is available:
http://gwfoundation.sf.net/tutorial-snmptrap-adapter.pdf

The M2 release is available at SourceForge: http://gwfoundation.sf.net

We plan to roll out the final release of Foundation 1.1 by mid March 2006. We are still looking for contributions from the Open Source community, so if you are a Foundation developer, please consider contributing your code for inclusion in the final release.
Below is a list of features under development (ToDos):

* JMS Listener -- Embedded topic server that would accept feeder
messages from any JMS subscriber.
* Adapters for any type of Monitoring data (JMX, log4j) or from
other Open Source or commercial tools
* Support for PostgreSQL, Derby, MS-SQL, Oracle, or other databases.

If you are interested in contributing to Foundation please contact [email protected]