(I apologize for the intrusion, but I thought that the members of this forum might be interested in Monarch, a new open source project that’s just been released as a beta.)
GroundWork Monitor Architect (Monarch) is a web-based configuration engine for Nagios. It’s an easy to use set of tools that allow a user to easily configure and maintain Nagios, without editing the configuration files directly.
Check it out: monarch.sourceforge.net/
I’ve slapped a wad of glue on this thread and made it sticky… 8)
Hmm, I just noticed that Monarch & Fruity are made by one and the same company. Is there anyone out there who can explain me the thought process behind developing 2 similar tools at the same time…? 8)
I just noticed that Monarch & Fruity are made by one and the same company.
You are correct, we are the developers of both Monarch and Fruity. The reason that we’re developing both has to do with the history of each product. We started developing Monarch about 18 months ago. It has always been a GroundWork property (though initially, it was a tool used internally to configure and support our clients’ Nagios installations)
We hired the lead developer of Fruity about 4 months ago, and in doing so, we offered to support the ongoing development of Fruity. Right now, both are under active development (and Fruity is rapidly approaching a 1.0 release).
In the future, we may consider merging the two codebases into one unified product (with an upgrade path from both), but there are other priorities on our development schedule – so for the moment, we are continuing to develop and support both products.
I’d encourage you to look at both of them, and determine for yourself which one fits your needs better. While they both solve more or less the same problem, they go about it in different ways, and we’ve found that people have a tendancy to prefer one over the other depending on the size/complexity of their network, and their existing familiarity with Nagios and its configuration.
Downloaded and used Monarch. Then downloaded and installed Groundwork Monitor. Very disapointed. Little documentation and clearly designed to be on a box as a stand alone monitor. Overwrites configs, setup cron jobs I can’t find…very disapointed. This doesn’t reflect what type of implementation nagios was designed and developed for. This should be a live cd tool for those that has no real interest in developing a good working monitor inside your infrastructure.
We are using Groundwork and Monarch in the company I work for. It takes some getting used to. But the UI starts to make sense. It does overwrite config files which at first is a nuisance for those used to working “under the hood.” But setting the UI as the master which retains status and nonstatus information keeps all the developers working consistently. The problem though appears to be that the Groundwork Monitor Open Source does not keep pace with the current version(s) of nagios. From what I’ve read, the latest version of Groundwork only supports nagios 2.1
sounds cool…can you please give the URL on how to install monarchy on CentOS 5?
thx in advance!
cheers!
Dar-C
Monarch (aka GroundWork Monitor Architect) has seized to be available on its own. Their latest standalone release was from july 2008, and has the following release notes:
[quote]GroundWork Monitor Architect (Monarch) is a full-featured, easy-to-use configuration system for use with Nagios. Monarch consists of a set of tools that allow a user to easily configure and maintain Nagios using GroundWork Monitor, without editing the Nagios configuration files directly.
GroundWork Monitor Architect (Monarch) is a primary component of GroundWork Monitor, GroundWork’s open source IT infrastructure monitoring solution, but it is also available as source to build for standalone Nagios. Based on Nagios and several other leading open source technologies, GroundWork Monitor delivers enterprise-class availability and performance for a fraction of the cost of commercial alternatives.
Monarch 2.5 (standalone) is available here on sourceforge and from our ftp site at:
ftp://archive.groundworkopensource.com/pub/monarch/monarch-2.5.0.tar.gz
The Monarch standalone version includes many bug fixes and enhancement to Monarch the Nagios configuration tool. Monarch standalone is the same version as shipped with GroundWork Monitor 5.2.
Monarch 2.5 will be the last standalone release. Since Monarch is an integral part of GroundWork Monitor any future Monarch releases will be integral to GroundWork Monitor.
The source tree is public and located at:
http://archive.groundworkopensource.com/groundwork-opensource/trunk/monarch
Note: The scripts to build a standalone Monarch distribution are still available at: http://archive.groundworkopensource.com/groundwork-opensource/trunk/monarch/standalone
There are no plans at this point to update these build scripts further: GroundWork will look to the community (you!) to maintain them, and will publish community-contributed build updates.
The forums for Monarch are available at:
http://www.groundworkopensource.com/community/forums/[/quote]
Since this program is no longer being maintained on its own, I am removing the ‘sticky’…