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

Download now the new Xian SNMP Device Simulator v4!

The new Jalasoft Xian SNMP Device Simulator is now available for download! Just go to our website and download it for free. Some of the features

- Simulate, routers, switches and other SNMP devices
- Robust background running service
- Easy to use console
- support for SNMP v1, v2 and v3

This simulator is great if you want to test any network monitoring tool, if you need to set up a demo or a create a POC environment. Of course we prefer that you use it to test our network monitoring solution Xian Network Manager.....

Click here to download

Click here to see how the new simulator works...

FAQ: How works the Xian Wings Architecture?

Jalasoft’s product, Xian Wings, gathers various monitoring information from MS System Center Operations Manager 2007/2012 such as states, alerts, performance graphs and displays them on a variety of mobile devices such as a smart phone or tablet; it is also possible to take direct actions from this mobile device in response to a particular event happening in Operations Manager.

In order to achieve this, Xian Wings requires installing a server component on an OpsMgr server or on another server that has direct connectivity to the OpsMgr environment followed by installing the Xian Wings client on any desired mobile device. These devices have to have direct http or https connectivity to the Xian Wing server.

Diagram:

Minimum System requirements

Xian Wings Server:

• Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Windows 2012 (Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8 for the console).
•  Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 SP1.
• Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft Net Framework 3.5
• Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 or 2012.
• A local or remote Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2 or 2008.

iPad / iPhone:  iOS 5.0 or above

Android: Android 2.2 or above

Windows phone: Windows phone 7.5 or above

Do not miss this great opportunity to get Xian Wings for smartphones

Get Operations Manager on your smartphone and be able to keep an eye on your IT environment any time, any place!!

more info http://www.jalasoft.com/wings

Jalasoft’s Brand New Xian SNMP Simulator v4

Whether it serves for testing purposes or for demonstrations, an SNMP Device simulator is always a useful tool to have at hand if you have to deal with SNMP Devices. Instead of creating an unnecessary overhead on your network, you simply use a certain tool and keep it local. However, finding a good one might be hard.  A straightforward and simple tool to use is the Jalasoft Xian SNMP Simulator v1.0. This version has been built based on previous experiences with our former simulator and has been thought of from the ground up to deliver an easy and robust simulated network experience.

Architecture

In order to deliver a robust and scalable solution the simulator has been based on agents. This means that the actual simulation takes place as a running service. This service can be installed on any Windows 7 or 8 or Windows Server 2008 or 2012. For control of the running services you need to run the console in the same place where you connect to the different agents. From there on it’s simple work to simulate any device.

Figure 1, An overview of the Jalasoft Xian SNMP Simulator architecture.

Simulating a device

Simulating a device has been simplified in this new version. Just open the console and right click on the agent that you want to simulate an SNMP Device, and then click on ‘Add device’. A simple wizard appears to help you with the simulation process. In case you don’t have an agent visible in the console, you just need to right click on the Agent Manager and choose ‘connect’.

Figure 2, The Jalasoft Xian SNMP Device Simulator console.

First you need to select the device you want to simulate and on which agent. The last one is already preset if you previously right clicked on the agent that you wanted to begin simulating a device. You have several out of the box options to chose from for the  device that will be simulated.  Select the device you want to simulte and click next. If you want to add a new simulater file you can do so by clicking ‘Add’ and selecting the appropiate file. Normally, Jalasoft support can help you in the process of creating a simulator file of one of your own real devices.

Figure 3, selecting the agent and the device to be simulated.

In the IP Address tab you need to select on which IP address you want to simulate the device.  It is possible to simulate the same device on multiple IP Addresses. This can come in handy when you want to do some scalability testing. Also, you do need to note that it only shows the IP Addresses that are available on the machine where the agent is installed and adding IP Addresses has to be done manually.  

Figure 4, selecting the IP Address you want to simulate the device with.

The last aspect that you have to configure are the SNMP settings. You have the option for SNMP v1,v2 and v3 and once selected you need to provide the security settings of the chosen version.

Figure 5, the SNMP security settings.

Once you have everything configured to suit your needs, all you need to do is click ‘Finish’ and the simulation of the device will automatically start on the agent that you assigned. Depending on the size of the device this can vary from a few seconds to a few minutes.

Now you have your device simulated and you can add it to network monitoring tools as if it was a real device. Just bear in mind that it is a read-only device.

Looking to do more?

Want to do more? Well, you have the option to create a simulation file from any real SNMP device that you have in your environment. Also, you can modify the simulation files that the product is shipped with to increase the ‘action’ of the published values.

When will it be available?

This new simulator will be freely available around the beginning of may 2013. For more information, keep an eye on this blog or contact Jalasoft Sales. 

 UPDATE!: The new Jalasoft SNMP Device Simulator is now available for download. Click here

Why is the Network Monitoring provided by System Center Operations Manager 2012 not enough?

A much too common scenario; you acquire Operations Manager 2012 so naturally you feel very happy that you’ll finally have a way to monitor your network and regain control over it again. Well, sorry to bust your bubble but you are wrong, you have technology that works great, but is actually obsolete.

I can practically hear you guys thinking, you’re probably saying “Of course you say that, you work for Jalasoft and you want to sell your product Xian Network Manager 2012 which you say provides better network monitoring than what System Center Operations Manager 2012 offers.” Well in a way that is true, but I’d like to give you guys some information and leave it up to you to decide. My point here goes a bit further than this.

We at Jalasoft, have had extensive experience with network monitoring since 2003 and in all of our years in the business one of the questions that often arrives to our support people is: “ ok, now I now there is too much traffic  going over interface 18 on this switch, what do I do now?” yeah, what do you answer? So we worked on a way to solve this dilemma for over two years and came up with our Xian Network Manager 2012 Netflow traffic analyzer, which certainly helps in answering the question above. With Xian NM it’s become a piece of cake to know who and what is responsible for this high amount of traffic, without any huge investments or hardware intervention. And the best part is, you just get this information in Operations Manager 24/7, alerts and performance data are available just as you are used to.

For those of you who know Operations Manager 2012, you have to admit that they are actually at a state where we were 8 years ago, and it definitely cannot analyze any traffic, something that is absolutely necessary in the era of public and private clouds and a 100% dependency on a stable and efficient network.

Curious? Just contact us for a demo!