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I mean, that's a good point, I mean, in the middle here, to kind of overview what your

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guys sort of thing, what round of way of going about things is, I mean, can you describe

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that briefly, like what the pulling together that you do?

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Sure, so there's a couple different ways you could go about building a network and system

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management project if you're going to go out and try to address the big four.

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One concept would be, I'm going to try to do it all in-house from soup to nuts, and there

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are certainly people out there who do that, and that's one approach, and it has pros and

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cons.

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The other approach, which is the one we take, is we say, okay, there are a lot of projects

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out there, like NAGAs, like Ganglia, that are pretty good at a specific point area functionality.

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And in fact, there's so many of them, in fact.

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They're good at their particular area, you kind of go, gee, what if I could tie them all

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together, right?

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So in our particular case, what we build really has to do is a framework, for the most part.

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So we actually build, so if we kind of slice it all up, right, you've got the guys, there's

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the generation layer, which are things being generated by systems.

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Okay.

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Right.

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And then you've got a collection layer where using whatever kind of monitoring protocol

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or technology you're doing, you're pulling it in, it could be SNMP, it could be WMI, you

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could be good at pulling in XML streams, et cetera, et cetera.

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Or just looking at blog files.

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Or just looking at blog files.

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Right.

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There's a lot of different ways to do it.

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RPC if it's really old school Windows stuff.

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You're pulling all that in.

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And then finally, you get to the middle and top layers where you're saying, okay, now I've

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got to make an engine that slices and dices this stuff, figure out what needs to be processed,

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what isn't, what's an alert, what's not.

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And then you need to have a presentation layer, the whole top part.

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So we're really focused for the most part on the top two layers at the engine portion and

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the presentation layer.

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What this allows us to do is we can go to, let's say, like Ganglia, who is a cluster monitoring

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project.

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And it's really good at what it does.

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And it's designed to basically keep track of nodes within a cluster.

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And there's a lot of different ways you can do it.

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But it doesn't really have an event console all by itself.

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So if you were like one of our customers and you're saying, I have a grid of 9,700 machines

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out there running something, you can say, okay, I'm going to use Ganglia for this part.

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But to take it to the next level, to really provide the management and the analysis and

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everything else, it needs to have stuff coupled with it.

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So Groundwork's philosophy is to basically, we want to be the one who is sort of the grand

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unifier of a lot of these various components.

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And they don't necessarily have to be open.

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We can obviously, in cooperation with guys like Nagios, we can ship the Nagios

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pieces with our product.

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You can't do that though for proprietary stuff, but that doesn't mean you can't hook

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it in.

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So what that means we can do is, so we now create a system that we can pull in basically

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the best of breed point solutions together at the monitoring level, whether they're proprietary

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or not.

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And we can then combine them together into a holistic whole.

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Right.

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The answer is to questions like this is always both.

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Right.

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But do you have more of sort of like the stack of stuff that's together or sort of like a

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pile of things that you can integrate together?

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I mean, what's kind of the approach that you initially take?

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Do you carve, do you build up all the stuff you want or carve away the things you don't want?

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You're right.

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The answer is both.

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So let's talk about, you know, which one's kind of in what bucket.

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Yeah.

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That's right.

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So, you know, out of the box, you know, so to speak, if we take, let's say, our Grammar Monitor

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Community Edition, our professional product, you know, right out of the box, it has the Nagios

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monitors and there's, you know, hundreds of plug-ins that you can use for Nagios to monitor,

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you know, even really, really weird stuff.

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Right.

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You know, IP toasters or whatever else.

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That's one of the benefits of open source stuff in this area is that it only takes one

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confident person with a weird thing to make it exist.

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So anyway, so out of the box, we got the Nagios piece and there's oodles, oodles of plug-ins

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that cover, you know, unbelievable amounts of stuff.

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And then we kind of, you know, move up the stack a bit.

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And then there's a bunch of components that also get into, let's say, reporting, for example.

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We use the BERT engine for our reporting.

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Right.

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So those things are already in there, as is the full set of functionality you need in terms

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of the console, if you're talking about some profiles that are already included for, you

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know, the more common things that are, you know, you would want to monitor.

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So the preset configurations with defaults and things like that.

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And of course, the web interface and the server it all runs on and everything else.

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Then, you know, kind of the next level is, well, what's in that kind of, you know, pull stuff

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around bucket?

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So there are integration pieces that we have developed for things like, let's say, ticketing

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systems that are available off the shelf for our professional service guys to hook up for.

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When we get down to it, so we also have a lot of other things that are not, let's say, bundled

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in with it right away, but you can download.

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So, for example, our Ganglia plugin isn't in the default RPM set.

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It's like an optional extension.

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It's an optional extension, right.

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And then we also have what we call a Groundwork Connect, which is our support site where people

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who are subscribers to us can log in.

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And not only do they usually have the regular support, you know, interface in terms of, you

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know, knowledge base and submitting problems and all this kind of stuff.

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There's another area there where they can share content with each other as well.

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Which is another thing that doesn't get talked about a lot in the system management world,

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which is that...

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Sharing knowledge, if you will.

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Well, right.

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And also sharing things that are not code.

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Yeah.

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Because most of the guys who are sysadmins, they're not full-time coders or maybe not even

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part-time ones.

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They script a lot, but they're not spending a lot of time instead of a...

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They need to be able to, like, share the procedure of going about...

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Procedures and scripts and other kinds, you know, custom reports they build, these kind

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of things.

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A lot of them, you know, don't necessarily spend a lot of time inside a compiler and don't

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want to, right?

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Right.

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So this kind of gives a level of user-contributed content, which kind of happens in parallel to

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whatever's happening with our interactions with the community as well, right?

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Right.

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So you have a new version coming out.

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We do have a new version.

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And so what are the kind of highlights that are coming in?

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Right.

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So we've got two things coming out next Tuesday the 25th.

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We've got Groundwork Monitor Enterprise, which is basically taking the components that we have

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been selling individually for Groundwork Monitor professionals.

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Wow.

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And we are creating a product line so that when people know that they're going to be in one

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of those kind of distributed environments, they know which version to pick.

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Right, okay.

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Right.

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So that, Groundwork Monitor Enterprise basically allows you to add child servers and distributed

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mining agents and standby servers.

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Right.

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So that if you're in a...

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Sort of high availability stuff.

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High availability stuff and capacity stuff that if you're...and we also...it also allows

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for you to add the network management pieces as well.

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So if you're in one of these bigger shops, if you're into the high hundreds or thousands

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of servers, that's the one you want to be looking at.

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Right.

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And then we have the professional product, which if you can run everything off of one server,

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that's the one you want to be looking at.

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And then we have the community edition, and that's the one where if you're, you know, less

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than a hundred servers and you want to use the free version or you want to kind of roll

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your own or you want to do as an eval for one of the other ones.

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Sure.

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Because it's the same code base.

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We give you a bunch of RPMs and it basically bumps you up.

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5.2, which is the new version, is a update to all of them.

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Right.

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So 5.2 is a...

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It's across the board.

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Right.

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And there's a lot of different features within 5.2 that were really geared in particular

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to providing beefier functionality for those enterprise guys.

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That's what everyone in your space is doing, you know, in the past however many months is

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beefing up performance, right?

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Beefing up performance.

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So I imagine all of you guys are encountering customers who are like, this is great, but

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we've got to turn it up to 11, man.

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And...

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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But it's a good space to be in.

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Sure.

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I mean, we don't regret that by any means.

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So we've got things that are...

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There's things that happens at the performance level.

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Like we've got everything from plumbing level stuff that give, for example, 5 to 10 volt increases

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on, you know, message processing, you know, way down in the guts up to, we've got guys

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in the beta tests who, from more of an end user perspective, are seeing, you know, 30% increases

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in the, you know, the number of nodes they can monitor for one device.

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Right, right, right.

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On top of all, though, there are a lot of presentation layer things that you have to

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do when you get an enterprise that don't really come into play.

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Like suddenly you've got, you know, this many more messages and events getting in front

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of the, you know, system administrator in question.

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So this point, A, you've got to be fast enough to do it, but the other part is that because

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there's now this greater volume of information, you have to provide him tools to make sense

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of it.

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That's right.

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So in our particular case, we put in a lot of filters and searching capabilities that

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allow them to make more sense of, you know, this voluminous amount of data.

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Right, right.

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There's sort of filtering and focusing improvements in the UI for things.

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Correct.

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As well, because again, we're talking about these integration points, is we found a lot

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of guys want to go in and they want to kick things off to other systems while they're in

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our console.

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There's a, basically, if you right click in, let's say, an event, you can select an action.

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For example, like, go kick off a travel ticket, pipe it into, let's say, the Remedy

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system.

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Oh, right, right.

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And it's actually a bi-directional integration too, so it comes back clear and you can actually

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go in.

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Is that primarily for help desk sort of situations or are there other sort of workflows you can

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kick off?

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Like, I mean, could you kick off doing some provisioning or something like that, if, like,

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you found some box that...

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So there's an API there, and to the extent that you could kick off a provisioning action,

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this gets into, like, data center automation at the end, that would really depend on what

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the provisioning thing is on the other side.

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Right, right.

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So I would say if it was something...

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So, I mean, it sounds like the right click thing you're talking about essentially will

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collect a bunch of parameters and then execute some external process if you will.

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Yes, yes, that's correct.

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And so that's, I mean, that's where you're getting at is that if, one, there was someone

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who wanted to write this stuff, or, you know, whether it was you or someone else, and also

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if the external thing was amenable to being kicked, as it were, to being kicked off.

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The other thing that we've also put in is we've found a lot of people who also want

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to have our stuff visually live alongside other stuff as well.

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Right.

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And so we put in what's called Rapid, which basically lets you put another web-based console

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interface running within Groundwork as well.

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So, for example, if you want to have some Atlassian product like JIRA, and you want to see it

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all within, in essence, you know, while you're within the same console view, you can go and

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you can do it, and it launches, you know, kind of, you know, in another tab, if you will.

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And there you can kind of have one grand, unified control center.

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And that's where we see guys in, like, NOC operation centers.

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Where they want the big board.

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Right, exactly.

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They also made a bunch of enhancements to make it easier to set up in terms of auto-discovery

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and auto-configuration, and that can work a couple different ways.

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One of which is that we can go out and do the discovery for you, and so we can find it.

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And the other option, and this is, again, something around here in a bigger environment, is people

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who want to import stuff that's already been discovered by something else.

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They've already got the nicely, clean, scrubbed discovery data.

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Right, so they've got this sense of what's out there already, and it could be that they're

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using, it could be an open source product, it could be a proprietary one, it doesn't matter,

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but it's stored in a format, so we can suck that into it.

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And is that like an XML thing, or just a spreadsheet that you imported to that, or how does that work?

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It depends on what it is, you know, believe it or not, more often, and it's dictated mostly

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by what we're sucking it from, more often than not, these days, it sounds kind of old school,

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it's a CFE file half the time.

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Sure, sure.

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But it works.

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I mean, that's a perfect, it's just line-by-line stuff, right?

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Right, right.

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It's just a list of, it's just a table, basically.

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And there's another reason why they're conscious about this, and this is something that people

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don't always realize in enterprises, when you kick off a discovery process, if you haven't

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forewarned other people, particularly in the security department, that you're going to do

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so, you know, all sorts of, you know, alarm bells can go off when you start probing everything

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in the network.

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We also mentioned there's a lot of enhancements we made to basically the performance capabilities,

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there's a lot of improvements we did to the reports and new graphs and everything.

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You can never have too many reports.

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And you've had BERT in there for a while, right?

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We have had BERT in there for a while.

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That's not a new thing.

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No, the BERT itself isn't new, but our enhancements of the ODA portion of it is, and including,

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you know, more out-of-the-box kind of reports that most people seem to want.

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It's a fine balance to provide the reports most common versus, you know, really bizarre

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corner case custom things, but...

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Right, like monitoring your IP toasters from...

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Right, monitoring IP...

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That probably wouldn't be one that's going to be...

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Response time for toast popping out.

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Exactly.

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You know, that kind of stuff.

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Well, thanks.

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I appreciate you taking all this time.

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That was great.

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It was great.