How to create a dashboard and widget in Xian Wings HD

You can easily create and configure a dashboard on your iPad which contains widgets of the monitored objects from your OpsMgr environment and their corresponding alerts and performance graphs. In this way, you can quickly review the states, alerts and graphs of your most important computers or devices in a single screen

1.  Open the Wings HD console.


2.  Tap on the ‘dashboards’ section and then on the ‘+’ button to create a new dashboard.

3.  Provide a name and select the desired layout of the dashboard you need and then tap on the ‘save’ button.


4.  Tap on the newly created dashboard to configure its widgets.

5.  In each widget area, tap the ‘+’ button to select the type of widget you need. There are 3 options: states, alerts and performance graphs.

6.  Configuring a widget is an easy process that includes a simple to use wizard for providing the parameters required in each widget. As an example, we will create a states widget by selecting the middle icon.

7.  Provide a name and an optional description. Tap on ‘Next’.


8.  You have the choice of selecting if you want to include specific objects or groups to be displayed on this widget. For this example, we will select objects and groups.

9.  Look for the specific objects (computers, devices, interfaces, disks, etc) you require and select them, then tap on ‘back’.

10.  Once all the required objects are selected, tap on ‘Next’.



11.  Select the status of the objects you want to see along with the properties that will be displayed and then tap on ‘finish’ to create this widget.

12.  The widget will immediately be filled with the desired objects. You can already select any of them to view more details such as associated alerts, diagrams, performance graphs, etc. or create another widget in the dashboard.

There is no need to save the dashboard or the widgets since they are automatically saved. Additionally, you can edit or delete each widget at any time along with the dashboard itself without affecting other dashboards or OpsMgr. For more information on Xian Wings HD please visit our website or contact sales(at)jalasoft.com.

How I stole back the android tablet from my son, and put a SCOM console on it

Arnold Hagens, Marketing Product Manager, Jalasoft

Well to give you a little bit of background, I have this Google Nexus tablet which seems to get lost all the time among all the junk I have at home and I think it’s mostly due to the fact that I don’t really know what to with it. Call me old fashioned, but I just have a hard time using it for actual work. My desktop is on almost all the time and sneaking into my home office to do some quick work is more my style. So to make a long story short, that is how it came to be that my three year old son basically claimed the Nexus tablet for himself and only hands it back to me when the Internet goes down or it runs out of battery.

With this in mind, the other night when my kid fell asleep before the tablet did, I thought I would spend the last 16% of battery life on a little experiment.

My Windows Phone (yes I have a hard time choosing the brand and OS) has been equipped with Xian Wings since they handed me the first alpha version.  For those who don’t know about Xian Wings, let me give you a little introduction. Wings is a mobile System Center Operations Manager console for Android, WP and iOS.

Since I’m very familiar with the product, I came up with the idea of actually installing the Android version Xian Wings on my Nexus tablet. This version was originally designed for Android phones, but we tested it on an Android tablet and it works perfectly fine.

I’m not going to go into detail about how to install the application now, there’s plenty of info elsewhere on that. Let me just point out that I’m simply using the Jalasoft test Xian Server for this small experiment and got the Xian Wings app through the Google Play Store, as is customary with any other Android application.

So once I connected my Nexus tablet to our Wings Server, it all worked like a charm. States, alerts, tasks and graphs where all running smoothly and I must say, the large screen makes a ton of difference, especially when showing the app to some of my colleagues. I took a few genuine screenshots to give you an idea.

Picture 1, Overview of the States of my devices and servers

Picture 2, Overview of the open alerts

 Picture 3, performance graphs

Now the only thing I’m worried about is when my kid taps on this app and finds out that it’s not your classic “angry birds” or “showering crocodiles” type of game that he’s so used to, he’s going to complain to Mom that Daddy stole his tablet and filled it with weird drawings known as performance graphs. But I took previsions, I downloaded a bunch of Minion videos to brainwash him into forgetting it ever happened…. ;-)

 

Ah, in case you want to try it yourself. Just request access to our Wings Server to give Wings a quick try before installing the server in your own environment. Check: http://www.jalasoft.com/xian/wings