GroundWork's Monitor is based on Nagios, an open-source application that provides monitoring functionality comparable to that of the large commercial products. Monitor is a composite application that enhances and extends Nagios by incorporating several other open-source software modules, a variety of optional proprietary software elements, as well as GroundWork software, documentation, and configuration guidelines and parameter settings.
Its list of capabilities include a variety of reporting tools, e-mail and pager notification functions, and client plug-ins for multiple platforms, including Windows and Linux. GroundWork distributes most of the Monitor software under the General Public License (GPL), so customers are free to copy and change it.
With Nagios, GroundWork can monitor any device that supports TCP/IP. It uses the standard Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request-and-response mechanism to detect a device's status. In addition, it can monitor the services running on a network device via a variety of other methods, says Thomas Stocking, GroundWork's CTO.
For instance, GroundWork can evaluate the response of any port for occurrences such as error messages and "OK" strings to determine the service's status. "If a service doesn't manifest itself on a TCP/IP port, the information can be gathered through agent technology such as SNMP," he says.
GroundWork also includes limited proactive management capabilities. For instance, it ships with an open-source plug-in called NRPE_NT that runs on a Windows server. When a critical service on a production machine shuts down unexpectedly, the plug-in can automatically restart it.
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