San Francisco - Zenoss Core isn't the only open source monitoring tool making waves. GroundWork Monitor Open Source is an excellent example of Zenoss' competition from other open source players.
| ADVERTISEMENT |
Although GroundWork and Zenoss have similar business models, their products are quite different. GroundWork is built around the very popular Nagios monitoring system, an excellent monitoring and alerting platform that can monitor anything you want it to. Its one glaring drawback is that it is incredibly time-consuming to configure unless you use a third-party configuration tool or write your own configuration management scripts. There are several tools available that provide a graphical, Web-based means to add and remove devices, but these typically have serious limitations in flexibility.
GroundWork has taken the concept of supercharging Nagios much further, by wrapping Nagios within an entirely new Web interface that covers both viewing Nagios output data and managing the Nagios back end. The result is a nice blend of an already successful monitoring package, a feature-rich Web front end, and the availability of a more capable professional edition with commercial support. Although GroundWork may not have been engineered from scratch as Zenoss was, these three factors together make GroundWork a strong player in the open source monitoring arena.
