An Interview With Thomas Stocking, VP Product Strategy At Unified Monitoring Software Company GroundWork

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Below is our recent interview with Thomas Stocking, VP Product Strategy at GroundWork:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to GroundWork?

A: GroundWork is a unified monitoring software company. We monitor anything! While we are usually deployed initially for IT infrastructure, the flexibility of our platform makes it an essential tool for managing hybrid clouds, application performance, and distributed infrastructures. We get the data from your systems and tell you the availability and performance of, well, anything you point GroundWork Monitor at. Of course, as a monitoring system we have dashboards, reports, notifications, and integration with ticketing systems.

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Q: Who is your ideal client and why?

A: Ideal from our perspective is someone who needs an incredibly capable monitoring system that’s easy to deploy. We have ways of making the impossible possible to monitor, but if you have a simple setup, then GroundWork Monitor is simple to set up for it. You can get as deep as you like into the precise settings, but you can also just let GroundWork roll out the defaults and get monitoring going in minutes. This means our ideal client could be anyone who needs monitoring, but I’d like to answer that question from a more personal viewpoint; Our ideal client is one who challenges us to be our best, pushes the limits of what’s possible, and is delighted when we have what they are looking for. Once we have solved the big monitoring problems for them, our customers trust us and share their insights and suggestions, and that’s an ideal customer relationship.

Q: Can you give us more insights into your features?

A: Ok, there’s a lot to monitoring these days. In particular, there is a wide array of metrics available through the use of APIs, especially those from cloud services like Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Often these metrics aren’t persisted long enough to be useful in the services themselves, but GroundWork can store and recall them for you, using standard formats that are useful if you want to train AI models with it. We can also do interesting things like combine metrics into a “synthetic” measure, like a ratio or a percentage, or a much more complex formula.

We analyse the data for you too, using histograms, correlation, and comparative measures to help you pick out anomalies. Our Insight dashboard does this without any specific configuration, out of the box. If you want to get fancy, though you can also use Grafana to make dashboards, too.

Speaking of dashboards, we have a great dashboard for NOC operators we call the NOCboard. It’s a set of compact, filtered views of aggregated service availability, overlayed with maintenance schedules and team comments. It can facilitate follow-the-sun workflows, and help NOC teams get the view they need to do their jobs. Like all GroundWork dashboards, it also supports role-based access controls allowing cross-team assignments and easy in-app security. It integrates with LDAP/AD too.

We just now added a way to send notifications to the APIs of external ticketing systems out of the box, along with Slack and SMS messages and more.

Q: What can we expect from GroundWork in the next 6 months? What are your plans?

A: What I can tell you is that we are continuing down the path of making monitoring both easier and more capable. To that end we are planning on using the GroundWork TCG project to expand our monitoring to Kubernetes clusters, making it more capable. After that we will make it easier to use by configuring GroundWork Monitor to run on a kubernetes cluster. We see a lot of our customers moving this way now, and we want to keep modernizing and staying current with the latest developments. Another great thing that we are bringing back is the community edition, a dockerized, stripped-down, free, unlimited monitoring package for those who really know their stuff and don’t need much in the way of support. Look for more from GroundWork on that topic later this year!

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Q: What is the best thing about GroundWork that people might not know about?

A: It depends what kind of monitoring requirements you have. We are really proud of our Application Performance Monitoring capabilities with OpenMetrics, so if that’s where your issues are, then that’s probably the best thing. We are also really happy with our Network Monitoring and discovery, too. If you’re managing a big network, or your company just merged with another company and you have to discover what the new network looks like, then probably that’s the best thing about GroundWork. Technology is constantly evolving, and we strive to evolve with it, in the event that you cannot find a way (or the best way) to monitor something new, GroundWork support includes help to answer questions on how to properly monitor something. In the end that’s probably the best thing about using GroundWork for everyone who does.