Friends of Ubuntu join hands for cloud watcher

Ubuntu friends GroundWork Open Source and Eucalyptus have unveiled a new tool for managing and monitoring virtual servers and software that span Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and similar IT fluffiness floating inside your own data center.

Eucalyptus offers an open-source platform for mimicking the Amazon EC2 setup behind your firewall, serving up on-demand access to scalable compute resources, and GroundWork is on the verge of beta testing a version of its IT management and monitoring package that handles applications running atop Eucalyptus, Amazon EC2, or traditional un-cloudy data center resources.

The new tool is known as GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud, and the limited beta program is now accepting applicants.

GroundWork says the tool will manage and monitor servers - both real and virtual - as well as software running atop those servers. This includes custom applications, databases such as MySQL, Oracle, and IBM's DB2, middleware such as Oracle's WebLogic, IBM's Websphere, and Tomcat, along with Hadoop - the open source distributed data crunching platform. According to the company, you can monitor the performance and availability of individual services and applications via graphical reports generated from "real-time" data. The GroundWork platform is designed as alternative to HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, and CA Unicenter.. Read more...