GroundWork Logo

Documentation:

Overview and API

Home:

http://gwfoundation.sourceforge.net/

Download:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gwfoundation/

Build tools:

Apache Ant 1.6.5
Apache Maven 1.0

Documentation:

Binary install instructions
Overview how to feed and normalize data into the Foundation Data Store

Foundation Forum:

Discuss the product, getting help to configure it or suggest new features

Publications / Seminars:

  • 4th International Conference on Computer Science (ICCSA-2006) Foundation Case Study
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    Why GroundWork Foundation?

    GroundWork Foundation is an IT management data abstraction layer and development platform. The Foundation data model allows the integration of any state, event, and performance data, independent of the Monitoring Application that produces it. This offers the possibility to store data for additional systems, including open source and commercial monitoring systems, databases, and even hardware, such as detectors or sensors. It also allows the integration of Application Monitoring data known as MBeans.

    Much work went into the performance enhancements. The message throughput was significantly improved by applying the following techniques:

    • Using new adapter SystemAdmin that allows grouping messages in transactions
    • Integrated JMS Topic & Queue server to enable publish/subscribe of events and guaranteed delivery of messages
    • re-factored Business layer to use Hibernate Criteria instead of HQL. This resulted in a significant performance improvement.
    • Improved documentation and tutorials available as PDF Foundation Bookshelf

    Status:

    • Current Version: Release 2.0.1
    • Libraries are available and can be referenced by the Maven build tool at the GroundWork repository

    Main features:

    • Foundation Web Service API using SOAP
    • Web UI for managing the underlying datamodel such as Application Types, Properties and managed hosts
    • Eclipse ODA datasource interacting with Foundation Web Service that allows creating Eclipse BIRT reports
    • Packaged as web application deployable into Tomcat 5.5.x or Jetty 5.x
    • Binary distribution as a complete application including Foundation, Eclipse Birt Report viewer and Jetty servlet container.
    • Source code is available in the Public Subversion Source repository
    • Pluggable data collectors / normalizers for integrating any monitoring data into a common data model
    • Property based data model that can be easily extended with Application specific data points
    • Feeder API that allows to extend, modify and update the underlying data model at run time.

    GroundWork Foundation 2.0.1 Binary distributions

    Groundwork Foundation has the following pre-requisites:
    • MySQL database 5.0. MySQL can be downloaded for from the MySQL site
    • Java 5.0 is required. Older version of Java won't work. Download the latest Java 5.0 JDK from Sun. Install Java and make sure that JAVA_HOME variable is set and the java executable $JAVA_HOME/bin/java is included in the path.
    • For detailed instructions how to deploy and configure Foundation see the INSTALL-BINARY which is as well included in the package.

    How can I help?

    The 2.0.1 Release is out the door and we are working on enhancements and new features. We are still looking for contributions from the Open Source community, so if you like to help to enhance Foundation, please consider contributing your code for inclusion into the project. Below is a list of features under development (ToDos):
    • Enhancing the WEB UI (servlet/portlets) for completeness.
    • Adapters for any type of Monitoring data (JMX, log4j) or from other Open Source or commercial tools
    • Support for PostgreSQL, Derby, MS-SQL, Oracle, or other databases.

    If you are interested in contributing to Foundation please contact Foundation development team

    Groundwork Foundation is covered under the GPL License