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