5.3 alpha program announced

GroundWork Announces GroundWork Monitor 5.3

Pre-Release for Open Source Community Trial and Testing

Trial enables community members to get an early preview of Nagios 3.0 integration with GroundWork Monitor Community Edition

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—November 11, 2008—GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (www.groundworkopensource.com), the leader in commercial open source systems and network management software, today announced a pre-release version of GroundWork Monitor Community Edition 5.3. The latest version of GroundWork’s flagship product is integrated with Nagios 3.0 and free to the open source community for testing and trial.

“GroundWork and Nagios have been working in partnership for more than four years. During that time, GroundWork has worked with the Nagios team to provide enterprise customers with monitoring and management solutions that deliver a great alternative to closed source offerings,” said Nagios creator and lead developer Ethan Galstad. “Nagios 3.0 provides features specifically aimed at larger deployments, and I’m looking forward to community feedback on the integration from GroundWork’s enterprise users.”

Nagios is an open source host, service and network monitoring program. Version 3.0 was released in early April and focuses on faster startup times, performance improvements and enhanced scalability for larger installs. Since release, Nagios 3.0 has been downloaded approximately 400,000 times.

“With the integration of Nagios 3.0 into GroundWork Monitor, it is important that we open the pre-release version of the product to the community for their scrutiny, expertise and feedback,” said Simon Bennett, Product Manager of GroundWork Open Source. “This integration further validates GroundWork’s amalgamation strategy -- combining and leveraging the strengths of more than a dozen proven open source projects including Nagios, RRDtool, SMPTT, and MySQL -- giving enterprise customers an integrated IT management suite with less cost and greater budgetary predictability than equivalent offerings from vendors like BMC, CA, HP, and IBM.”

In addition to Nagios 3.0 integration, the GroundWork Monitor Community Edition 5.3 pre-release features a wizard-based GUI installer and pre-bundling of Java and MySQL, for quicker and easier setup. It also features unified packaging, allowing for installation on all supported Linux distributions from a single download.

As GroundWork Monitor 5.3 development progresses, expect to see additional features related to enhanced scalability and improved service management, important for ITIL-oriented IT service delivery.
Download:

To download GroundWork Monitor Community Edition 5.3 pre-release please visit:
Webcast:

GroundWork will be hosting a 5.3 Pre-Release Webcast on November 18, 2008, for more information or to sign up to attend please visit: http://www.groundworkopensource.com/resources/webcasts/5.3-alpha-orientation.html
About GroundWork

San Francisco-based GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (http://www.groundworkopensource.com) is the market leader in commercial open source network and systems management software, delivering enterprise-class network, system and application management solutions at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions.

GroundWork's best of breed approach gives customers the flexibility to use diverse open source and proprietary technologies together under a unified interface, allowing users to leverage the advantages of open source while simultaneously preserving existing investments in legacy management tools. GroundWork’s solutions are in use at organizations like Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, AOL, Genworth Financial, SAIC, Seton Hall University, Siemens, and World Bank. GroundWork’s solutions are available from GroundWork, its partners including Red Hat, Unisys, Fujitsu, and a worldwide network of channel partners. The company is privately held, with investments from Canaan Partners, Mayfield Fund, JAFCO Ventures and SAP Ventures.