GroundWork Open Source and Hyperic, two of the members of the so-called ‘Little Four’, announced additions to their systems monitoring and management software while Centeris, which focuses on Windows and Linux interoperability, also updated its core offering.
San Francisco-based GroundWork announced that it has updated its Monitor Professional product with improved support for virtual environments and Java applications.
The product is now capable of managing both virtual and physical servers from the same user interface, providing monitoring of the guest and host virtual machine as well as applications they are running.
Support for Java applications is provided by a new Java Virtual Machine plug-in, which exploits Java Management Extensions technology to provide monitoring information about Java applications and services.
Meanwhile Hyperic, which is also San Francisco-based, launched version 3.1 of its open source HQ management platform, adding support for 18 new third-party products and expanding alert and performance capabilities.
New technologies supported in version 3.1 include the likes of Coldfusion, Glassfish and Jetty, and brings to 64 the number of technologies managed by the HQ software. Version 3.1 also features a central alert management interface, contextual help and a customizable interface.
As well as HQ 3.1, Hyperic also announced the beta release of HQ Enterprise 3.1, which is based on the core open source platform but also adds extensions for access and policy control, as well as reporting, among other things.
Along with Zenoss and Qlusters, GroundWork and Hyperic make up what analyst firm Redmonk has coined the Little Four of open source management vendors that are beginning to challenge the established leaders with lower deployment costs and more flexible licensing.
Bellevue, Washington-based Centeris may not have forced its way into that little group, but it is establishing a niche for itself in enabling interoperability between Linux and Active Directory.
The company started out life enabling Linux server management in Windows-based environments but found strong demand for its identity management functionality, which it broke out as Likewise Identity 3.0 earlier this year.
The company has now updated that product to version 3.5, providing integration with Microsoft Group Policy Management Console and Group Policy Object Editor, giving group policy capabilities across Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac systems.
The company’s Linux administration software is still available in the form of Likewise Admin, while the two products are also available as a combined suite. Though Centeris is arguably less-committed to the open source development model, the Likewise Open Agent is available on Sourceforge.
