Universities Sign On for Open Source Monitoring

• By David Nagel
• 05/29/08

With open source a large and growing facet of IT in higher education, a number of universities are signing on for third-party support services aimed at implementing, maintaining, managing, and monitoring OSS deployments.

According to one such open source support services provider, GroundWork Open Source, 18 universities have signed on for its GroundWork Monitor solution, which provides monitoring, management, alerts, and reporting aimed at unifying "diverse open source IT point solutions into an overarching, consolidated view of their networks and systems, while simultaneously increasing server/admin ratio and maintaining to open source extensibility," according to GroundWork.

"The biggest challenge in our university environment is being able to coordinate campus wide monitoring efforts while maintaining economies," said Tom Ammon, network engineer at the University of Utah's Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC), in a statement released yesterday. "Because of GroundWork's extensibility, we are able to collaborate with multiple departments across campus and leverage the talent of other system administrators to gain central visibility into the health of our systems. As we continue to increase our monitoring efforts we will be able to have a birds-eye-view of the university using GroundWork Monitor."

A sampling of universities that have signed on for GroundWork Monitor include University of California, Santa Cruz; University at Buffalo, Lenoir-Rhyne College; Liberty University; University of Wyoming; University of Adelaide; and CHPC.

Further information on GroundWork solutions for higher education can be found here.