Today we are releasing the latest version (6.3) of our flagship GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, with a host of features our customers have asked for. The two big themes are visualization tools and the return of an old favorite—the trouble-view dashboard. We also add support for accessing GroundWork Monitor on the iPad, furthering our thrust into Mobile IT.
These new features will improve the productivity of your IT team and make it even quicker to deploy our deep network, server and application monitoring in your environment.
GWNE Release 6.3 is available today for our Flex customers, downloadable from our support portal.
https://kb.gwos.com/login.action?os_destination=%2Fdisplay%2FFLEX%2FDownloads
What’s behind the visualization theme? Network and system administrators have long known that it’s easier to understand what’s going on by using rich graphics and graphs rather than long lists of dense text. Hence the popularity of the open source cacti and NagVis projects. In Release 6.3, we include both cacti and NagVis into the core GroundWork Monitor Enterprise product.
Our new Views feature, based on NagVis, allows IT operations people to create diagrams of their environments—and then make them live with monitoring status of each element. These diagrams can be logical or physical infrastructures, and even business processes. Thus sys admins can easily create diagrams to present operations information in a form that’s accessible to end customers, partners and executives.
The GroundWork user interface combines graphs and information from multiple sources, including cacti, into a coherent single-pane view of your monitored infrastructure. For all you who have manually added cacti or NagVis to GWME, not to worry. Your existing configuration will be maintained as you upgrade to 6.3.
Return of trouble view: Our users loved the old version, back in release 5.3, because it quickly draws attention to problems now! Now it’s back in 6.3, better than ever with a targeted view of current problems with additional context information.
In other additions, note that supporting iPad gives GroundWork Monitor yet another way to make IT personnel productive, even if they’re out-and-about. Here are other new elements in Release 6.3:
Optional audio alarms in the event console (yes, they’re off by default), a feature particularly useful in large NOCs.
Updated GWOS Java monitoring agent supports Oracle Weblogic 10 application servers in addition to Red Hat JBoss, Tomcat, and IBM Websphere already supported.
Improved reliability and security for the GWOS portal application by improving session handling and access control for select
applications.
Improved layout especially with long lists of items in the configuration application.
New Quick Navigation component (for start-up menus) to access common features and functions.
Custom text for context links to related applications in status viewer.
Filter lists in dashboards to show only troubled items. Ideal for operations dashboards in large environments where a complete view is too large to display.
We expect GWOS customers to be as excited about these product improvements as we are. We owe a big thanks to our engineering team, partners and everyone involved in the projects for their contribution to this release.