Xian NM SP4 is here! Topology Diagram, dashboard for all SMPs, Flow improvements and more.

New features to drastically improve your experience monitoring a network of any size:

Topology diagram: 

Topology diagram is a new feature that lets users insert Operations Diagrams into OpsMgr and these diagrams can include automatic and/or manual relationships between the objects. So basically a user draws a diagram on the Xian NM console that includes any monitored OpsMgr object and reviews the results on the OpsMgr console inside a dashboard with two widgets; Topology widget which displays a diagram with the objects states and relationships states; and Relationship alerts which display alerts related to the relationships and the relationships display colors according to their states (Green: Healthy, Red: Alert/Critical, Yellow: Warning, Blue: Not monitored, Black: Maintenance).  The topology diagram feature works for all the OpsMgr 2012 distributions. Click image to view full size.

Dashboard for all SMPs:

Another new feature can be found on the Xian NM smart management packs (SMP) where an out of the box dashboard per each device type displays monitoring information from the monitoring devices of such category. The dashboards include the following widgets: states, alerts, details, performance graphs and objects by performance.

This feature works for all the OpsMgr 2012 distributions. Click image to view full size.

Update server for IP address resolving:

A new service called Xian NM Update server translates external IP addresses listened by the Flow monitoring feature into their domain or website names in order to give a clear idea of the sites the internal computers talk to. This service gets connected through internet to our Jalasoft Update server (web service) to resolve these IP addresses into website names in order to have such names on the Flow alerts and performance data displayed on the OpsMgr console. 

IPFIX support for Flow monitoring:

An additional NetFlow technology version is now supported on Flow monitoring: IPFIX NetFlow; so devices running this NetFlow version can now be monitored by our Flow Monitor feature along with NetFlow V5 and V9, as well as SFlow.

Application ports naming:

It is possible to assign a name to any desired port that is been monitored through the Flow monitoring feature, so a proper name now displays on the OpsMgr console for the alerts or performance counters associated to those ports.  Click image to view full size.

Other enhancements:

Topology discovery via SNMP monitoring.  Before Xian NM 2012 SP4, we had to provide TELNET or SSH credentials to the Topology Discovery Task feature to discover devices located in different VLANs, now these credentials are no longer required since devices on different VLANs are discovered through SNMP only.  

Flow configuration section.  The different flow configurations like Filters, IP groups, Unknown IP addresses are now unified under the Flow node within the Configuration section of the Xian NM console.

Duplicated objects on the Xian NM reports.  Xian NM reports now do not display repeated device names on the devices selection when configuring a report.  Note that only devices will not be repeated, but elements that have been added and removed will keep showing.