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

For our upcoming release: Improved SMP for Virtual Center with additional rules and version support

The Xian NM 2012 Smart Management Pack for Virtual Center has been improved and updated for Xian NM 2012 SP2, by using the latest VMware SDK v2.5 for communication that lets Xian NM add support for the latest Virtual Center versions and create new additional rules to monitor more aspects of the associated ESX hosts and virtual machines.  

Supported Virtual Center versions:

2.0.0
2.0.1
2.0.2
2.5.0
4.0.0
4.1.0
5.0.0
5.1.0

New Virtual Center rules:

Below you’ll find a list of the new Virtual Center rules available in Xian NM 2012 SP2. Notice that each of these rules can be configured to generate alerts and/or collect performance counters and they also come with related reports in OpsMgr.

ESX disk latency time
ESX disk total SCSI-bus reset
ESX free memory state
ESX kernel latency time
ESX total aborted SCCI commands
ESX total executed SCSI commands
ESX total latency time
VM disk latency time
VM disk total SCSI-bus reset
VM kernel latency time
VM memory swap in rate
VM memory swap out rate
VM total latency time
VM CPU idle time
ESX Incoming Dropped Packets
ESX Incoming Packets
ESX Outgoing Dropped Packets
ESX Outgoing Packets
ESX PcNet Incoming Traffic
ESX PcNet Outgoing Traffic
VM Incoming Dropped Packets
VM Incoming Packets
VM Outgoing Dropped Packets
VM Outgoing Packets


Availability

The new VMWare VCenter Management Pack will be available starting from Q3/2013 in SP2 for Xian Network Manager 2012. For more information, please contact our sales department at sales(at)jalasoft.com.
 

Why not to use Operations Manager to monitor your network.

With constant changes in your private and public cloud comes the need to constantly make small modifications to your network monitoring policies. If you’ve made an unfortunate mistake and you’re using OpsMgr to monitor your network, you’ve probably noticed that it is just too complicated. Besides that, you probably reached the conclusion that not all devices can be monitored and that you have absolutely no real clue of what you are monitoring and what thresholds you are using.

“What on earth happened? Was it that your boss is a bit stingy and didn’t feel like he had the budget to get a real network monitoring tool?”

If you’re just starting with Operations Manager, you probably need some time to get things set up for your server and application monitoring, that’s understandable and will probably be enough. But please, when it comes to monitoring your network, get serious!  OpsMgr is just not up to par. You want to know why? Take a look at the following reasons:

So let’s see how much time you’re actually wasting? First, you probably wait an eternity hoping that your device will be discovered by OpsMgr to only find out that it cannot be. Or if you’re lucky, it is discovered but not correctly or completely.

Second, how are you going to manage the monitoring policy? Will you just risk weeks or months of work by depending on the totally mysterious intervals and thresholds the management pack comes with? Good luck with that! If you’re looking to throw away some more precious minutes, you could of course enter the twilight zone of over rides and change it all yourself? However, don’t forget to keep track, you might end up with worse thresholds than you started with.

Oh, and what do we do when we have a Cisco Nexus for example, and you are adding new Virtual Ethernet Interfaces? You’re certainly pushing your luck in hoping that the discovery might find them? Maybe that does occur, but what threshold will you use? Ups! But of course, you can always override and keep track of that in an excel sheet, like it was done back in the day.

OK, maybe we are a bit sarcastic, but we’ve seen several customers that arrive at our doorstep, tired of trying to monitor their network with OpsMgr, only to find out that it is just so much easier to do it through Xian Network Manager.

• Network device discovery in seconds
• A robust generic device discovery, works with anything that has SNMP
• An easy overview of your current used thresholds and options for automatic and dynamic thresholding
• Continuous dynamic device updates

Pricing starts at $35 USD per device. Not something you need to think about very long. And most known network devices have special MPs, and otherwise the Generic MP can always handle it.

More info on: http://www.jalasoft.com/xian/networkmanager