Tag Archives: groundwork

Network Monitoring Trials – Part I

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After dinner tonight, I’m going to start setting up my Xen VMs and installing some monitoring software. I’ve decided that Hyperic and OpenNMS will be the first round – mainly because their free versions seem to be the most heavy-weight, and will probably take more installation time. GroundWork Open Source will come sometime later this week.

While the research that I did today has led me to start formulating some opinions on each of the contestants, I’m going to withhold comment until I get all three up and running, and have done some real work with them.

Google Loves Me! and Monitoring System Testing

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I happened to visit Google Webmaster Tools tonight. On the down side, a lot more of my redirected pages (jantman.dyndns.org:10011) are indexed than those from the domain (jasonantman.com). On the positive side, my search stats are quite impressive – for example, searching “hpadu” (the HP Proliant Array Diagnostic Utility) gives my Wiki as the #9 result – searching “hpasm sles10″ shows my site as #3! Most amazingly, there are only two HP pages above mine in both of the queries.

I guess trying to put every bit of knowledge I pick up in my blog or wiki pays off. And hopefully some people are getting help.

On another note, later this week I’m going to setup two virtual machines on my spare PowerEdge 650 to test some network monitoring systems – specifically, Hyperic HQ, OpenNMS, and Groundwork Open Source. Thanks to John, Peter, and Jeff G. (of OpenNMS) for finding my little-known blog and suggesting I try them. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to run on this poor system (2.4GHz P-III is the fastest I have, but 768MB RAM is a bit weak), but I’ll do the best I can, and post my results.

One comment – I can’t seem to find a feature list for OpenNMS, so I may be wrong, but it looks like Hyperic HQ may be in the lead at the moment, simply because it seems to include built-in asset tracking with hardware discovery – something that takes me way too long to manually keep up-to-date. On another side-note, the web site for Groundwork Open Source leaves a sour taste in my mouth, as it’s pretty sparse – there’s a lot of space given to the Enterprise edition, but not much text about the Open Source version.