I dont like Google Groups

[blindzero]

Hi GW-Team,
sorry to say, but Google Groups is one of the worst choices for a
substitution of the old forum.
Especially because of a missing topic-structure within here...
There are a lot of other possibilities (sf.net e.g.) but why
this...!?!?
Just wanted to say this...
Matthias

[TeleData]

Yeah, the lack of an easy-to-navigate subject hierarchy is extremely
challenging.

Plus I don't see a way to search all groundwork related groups
easily....

[Sisko]

I agree 100% !

I also have to say that i'm very disappointed to see no further
development for the "free" edition...

[blindzero]

Definitely...

Especially with the new forum there are nearly no users anymore that
read the posts and may help...so there is no community for the CE at
the moment at all.

Sorry guys, but:
- GW _was_ the best product in that Nagios-bundling-area
- you're business strategy fails in my point of view (its better to
make it like others: give the product away and just sell service)

For these reasons I move away to the second best product...

Bye,

Matthias

[Dr. Dave]

We are of course sorry to see you go as a user of our free product.
If you are still reading this thread, what service have you purchased
from us, or what service would you have purchased from us?

[Greg W. Webster]

Unsure if he will answer, but I'll jump in...

On Google Groups: It's a hell of a lot better than what you had before, which was nearly useless because of spam. Google can and does do better on that, so good on ya for offloading that required effort. I have no problem with Google Groups.

On Services and business model: I agree with the poster about updating the free version. It should be kept a couple/few versions behind the paid version (the paid can and should have other benefits). Toward the start of my implementation of GWOS, we likely would have purchased a "setup & tweak" service had that been available. Not only does this give you a small cash flow, but also serves as a sales vehicle for your paid product in upgrade from GWOS when the customer needs to expand. As it was, I struggled a lot, the forums were relatively useless, and it cost us more time and money to figure things out on our own than it likely would have cost getting a Groundworks expert to help out.

For what it's worth, our current biggest challenge in our GWOS implementation is cutting down the amount of messages...a tweaking effort to reduce what many people think of as spam. We've got about 50 recipients of messages, 2100 services, about 350 hosts all over North America (not all recipients receive all messages, by any means, but they complain nonetheless). 

[Dr. Dave]

We'll take the feedback on updating CE and review, but I can't promise
anything in the short term.

In the past GroundWork has not offered services on top of CE other
than a migration service to our paid subscription products. I see
your point in how a setup and tweak service is valuable, especially in
the absence of an on-demand or other training offering to educate the
first time GroundWork Monitor user.

Cutting down messages is one of the most important parts of our
services engagements. We call it 'calibration' and aim to reduce
false positives to less than 1% in any 24 hour period. You need to
take a baseline of your system, and then day by day review the alarms
that would be generated and determine the false ones. Threshold or
other configuration settings need to be changed to eliminate these.
We choose to do this before notifications are turned on to real
contacts because then it's too late to avoid fatigue. If you still
can't get false positives down then you may want to consider whether
the things you are monitoring are really worth waking you up at 2 in
the morning for, and eliminating them from your coverage. We find you
get the most value from a small number of checks, but I'm sure you
already know that which is why you've got your average # of services
down to 7 on each host.