Documentation

Groundskeeper documentation

How to install Groundskeeper, what it watches, how to set up each connector and how the editions work. The full set of pages, including alerts, backups and troubleshooting, is in the Groundskeeper wiki.

• AI Features
  Groundskeeper can use AI to turn raw monitoring data into plain-English summaries and answer questions about your IT estate.
• Alerts Page
  The Alerts page is the short list of things that need someone to look at them right now: every warning and critical event that nobody has dealt with yet.
• Alerts and Notifications
  Groundskeeper tells you about problems three ways: a weekly digest email, immediate alert emails, and messages to a Teams or Slack channel.
• Backup and Restore
  Groundskeeper keeps everything it needs in a small number of files on the server.
• Central Edition
  The Central edition adds MAT hub-and-spoke aggregation to Groundskeeper, giving a Multi-Academy Trust a single pane of glass across all member schools --...
• Connectors
  Connectors are how Groundskeeper reads from the systems your school already runs. Each one pulls status into the dashboard, the feed, and the SLT view.
• Cyber Essentials Readiness
  The Cyber Essentials page shows how your Windows computers are doing against the five technical controls of the NCSC's Cyber Essentials scheme.
• Dashboard
  The Dashboard is the page you land on after signing in.
• Devices
  The Devices page lists every machine and piece of network kit that Groundskeeper knows about, in one table.
• DfE Filtering and Monitoring Readiness
  The DfE expects every school to have filtering and monitoring in place, to know who is responsible for it, and to review it.
• Firewall & Network
  Groundskeeper is self-hosted: it runs on a Windows Server on your own network and reaches out to the systems it monitors.
• Getting Started
  This guide walks through installing Groundskeeper and completing the first-run setup wizard.
• Incident Log
  The Incident Log is a simple record of what you did about a problem: "this alert fired, here is what I did." It is there so the work is written down after...
• Intelligence Page
  The Intelligence page is a workspace for stepping back from the live feed.
• Maintenance Windows
  A maintenance window tells Groundskeeper that a device, a connector, or the whole estate is expected to be off or unreachable at a known time -- a firewall...
• Network Diagram
  The Network page draws a diagram of the systems Groundskeeper monitors, coloured by how each one is doing.
• Reports Page
  The Reports page gathers the longer-running checks in one place: how each connector has been getting on, the scans that look across your whole estate (disk...
• SLT Dashboard
  The SLT view is a simplified, traffic-light dashboard designed for senior leadership -- a head, business manager or governor who wants to know "is IT OK?"...
• Service Account
  Groundskeeper runs as a Windows service on your server. By default that service runs as Local System -- which is fine for the cloud connectors.
• Software Advisories
  Groundskeeper already knows which programs are installed on your computers.
• Staff Status Page
  A calm page for teachers and other staff that answers "is the internet up? should my email be working?" in plain words.
• Troubleshooting & FAQ
  Common issues and questions. If something here doesn't cover it, ask in Discussions.
• Two-Factor Sign-in
  Groundskeeper can ask for a second step when you sign in: a six-digit code from an authenticator app on your phone (Microsoft Authenticator, Google...
• What Groundskeeper Watches
  Most alerts come from a connector, and every threshold a connector uses is a setting on its card under Connector Settings.