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]

[mitsuto]

Hi Roger,

Peter told me that foundation is not included on groundwork monitor as of yet, and this gets me very confused about why should I need foundation.

I was thinking that it would be the underlying framework for all data gathered from Nagios, Cacti, SNMP, etc. But with groundwork monitor, if foundation is not there, and even the feeders been started to load data from nagios status.log to database, what is the real purpose of foundation?

It is just for integrating and serve as a framework to create applications (using all the APIs) to make custom reports, and whatever we can think of?
_________________
Marcel Mitsuto Fucatu Sugano

[rruttimann]

Just to be clear:

GroundWork Foundation is not included in the OpenSource version of GroundWork Monitor but It's an essential component of GroundWork Monitor Professional.

GroundWork Monitor OpenSource includes a lightweight data store which is not extensible (doesn't support pluggable Data Normalizers), scalable and distributable ( enterprise middle ware).

If you like to integrate different data (SNMP, Syslog, JMX,..) and like to have thousands of checks you definitely need Foundation.

Roger

[mitsuto]

Thanks for that clearance.

Now, i am decided that we definitely need foundation working together with monitor, because we have a huge nagios config with over 12k services, on almost 2700 devices. My actual config can't deal with demanding views of alerts within Native Nagios Web-interface. As we are trying to gather more information from running services and applications, I've introduced the concepts of Monitor to our development team, soon we will be asking you guys for a demo of Monitor Professional, but before this, we are studying with the Open Source versions of both foundation and monitor. Integrating both is something obscure yet, but we hope that we can learn a lot, just by trying to figure out the framework and from your clear advices.

Monitor is running but in a testing environment. Foundation is waiting it's time to integrate with monitor.

Thanks for all, and keep the good working!
_________________
Marcel Mitsuto Fucatu Sugano

[Guest]

A good start would be to install Foundation (get the binary package) and import your Nagios data into Foundation by running the feeders. This way you have all the data in the back end and you could use any Report tool to mine the data.

This way you could use your data with a professional version and you know that it loads and updates correctly.
The OpenSource version shows you the look and feel while the professional allows you to handle more data points.

The data will load fine but with the amount of checks and hosts you might need to fine tune Foundation for optimal performance. I could give you some guidance once I know more details about your data.

Just curious:
What is your checking interval for the 12k checks.
All Nagios checks or do you have external checks snmp/syslog/JMX?