GroundBreaker News, April 2007
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Hello!It's that time again — time for Spring Cleaning! Do you have a plan for unexpected emergencies? Is your IT management solution operating at peak performance? Well, over the next two months, we'll help you dust away any cobwebs you may have. We'll take a look at your monitoring solution, focusing on the need for a standby monitoring server and stressing the importance of regular system check ups. In addition to these columns, Thomas Stocking, co-Founder of GroundWork and Technical Evangelist will cover three typical usage scenarios during next week's Open Source Network Monitoring Best Practices Webinar. He'll show that you don't have to break the bank to know what's going on in your infrastructure. If you haven't registered for the Webinar yet, be sure to do so today. If you missed the first two, you can still catch them here. The next three-part Best Practices series will be in the Fall. If there's a topic you're dying to hear more about, let me know! Thomas along with other GroundWorkers, Taylor Dondich, Peter Mui and Rich Trezza may be coming to a town near you. Check out the events below to see where you can hear more about Nagios*® and Open Source Network Monitoring Best Practices. Thank you to everyone who downloaded GroundWork Monitor Open Source (GWMOS) 5.1 alpha and gave us feedback. Our forums were very active last month. And finally, congratulations to Andy Beals of Cataphora who won a Nabaztag Smart Rabbit from ThinkGeek. If you register when you download GWMOS 5.1 beta, you'll be entered into a drawing for your very own smart rabbit. The rabbit integrates with GroundWork Monitor and comes with a "notify by rabbit" method so your bunny can alert you about problems on your network before your customers do! Remember that you can increase your chances of winning by participating in testing or being active on the forums. Sincerely, Eden Hensley,
GROUNDWORK Open Source, Inc.
Get Peace of Mind for Unexpected EmergenciesAre you prepared to handle unexpected emergencies such as a monitoring server outage? If you have a hardware or software failure on your primary server will monitoring still be up and running? Did you know GroundWork Monitor Standby Server can give you that peace of mind? Should your GroundWork Monitor Professional server (Primary Server) have planned or unplanned downtime, GroundWork Monitor Standby Server automatically picks up the monitoring duties for the entire IT environment and continues to receive service checks, process alarms, and send out notifications to key personnel. You shouldn't have to worry any longer about whether your business-critical infrastructure will continue to be monitored and managed 24x7, so until June 30, we'll give you a 25 percent discount on GroundWork Monitor Standby Server. Get more info about GroundWork Monitor Standby Server.
Community News by Peter MuiEarlier this week I added a "How Do I..." category to the GroundWork Forums. The inspiration came from the fact that there was plenty of great information in the existing forum postings, but finding it in long threads was difficult. Framing the posting in a "How do I..." format helps to structure the posting just enough to help people reply more effectively. My plan is to go back through the forums and see if there are other topic threads I can re-title with "How Do I...", creating yet another rich mechanism for conveying information effectively in the forums. Next month's Monitoring SIG, on May 9, promises to be exciting. The topic is "Mini-to-Mega-Monitoring" and will offer two presenters spanning the breadth and complexity of monitoring sites. First, Jim M. will present the modest monitoring needs of his "two servers at the colo" configuration. He doesn't have any monitoring in place yet, so we'll brainstorm about what he should deploy and how. Then, Coleen B. will discuss the current challenges and future plans for the three-and-a-half sys admins managing and monitoring a 3000+ servers(!) web farm. We'll use these two examples to frame how to approach setting up and maintaining a monitoring setup. For more information about the Monitoring SIG meetings, including time and location, click here. This weekend, I'll be heading to Bellingham, WA for the LinuxFest NW. This is the second year running that GroundWork Open Source has been a supporter of this event. I'm surprised at the great distance people travel for this event: people attend from as far south as Portland, OR, and as far north as Whistler, Canada. Last year, Francois Caen gave a great presentation on IT monitoring basics, and this year he'll be giving two of them: one on each day. GroundWork will also be sending Taylor Dondich and Thomas Stocking to give presentations; Taylor will be promoting his O'Reilly eBook, "Network Monitoring with Nagios", and Thomas will be presenting on best IT monitoring practices. By Peter Mui, Open Source Community Advocate Find out more about the GroundWork Community.
Technology Insight by Craig Thomas:
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