by Roberto Alcocer
For System Center Forum readers that might have missed our first blog posts, this is Jalasoft’s sixth article about Xian Io’s functionality in a series of eight. Prior posts discussed the monitoring of network device interfaces, port status, a device’s response time, asynchronous monitoring, the monitoring of processes and distributed applications with Xian Io.
As we saw on earlier posts, monitoring a network device with Xian is a simple task that consists on discovering it by providing its IP address and SNMP community string and then applying one or several rules to immediately start monitoring it and receiving counters and alerts on OpsMgr 2007.
The problem starts when you have already discovered several devices and need to manually apply similar rules to all of them; moreover, imagine that after adding all these rules to all your devices, you find out that one of the parameters you provided your rules with, such as the schedule, is wrong or has to be modified. Then to fix this error, you would have to manually edit one by one all these rules. Finally, what if you had another environment with similar devices and you wanted to apply the same policy (list of rules with specific parameters) that you previously defined to these devices? Most likely you will have to write down the list of rules and their parameters on a piece of paper and then start with the same manual procedure, hopping that you will not need to modify or correct anything afterwards.
Solution:
Xian Io Network Manager implemented a mechanism by defining policy templates that will allow network administrators to save valuable time. These policy templates contain a predefined list of rules which you can apply to one or several devices at once and that you can link to your devices. So by changing a parameter on the template, you are automatically modifying it on all the rules applied to your devices. It is also possible to import and export any policy template that you defined. To get a better idea of this features’ functionality let’s take a look at creating, applying, editing, importing and exporting policy templates in Xian Io:
Creating a policy template
- Open the Xian Io console and then click on the ‘Policy Templates’ button.
- Select any device category, such as ‘Cisco switches’, then right click over the folder and finally click on the ‘New’ context menu option. The following dialog will be displayed:
- On the ‘Policy template properties’ dialog, define a name for your policy and a description.
- Double click on any desired rule listed on the left tree list, its configuration wizard will be displayed, then provide all the parameters, such as threshold, severity level of the alert to be sent to OpsMgr, the schedule, etc. and then click on the ‘Finish’ button so that the rule will be now displayed on the right side of the ‘Policy template properties’ dialog.
- Repeat the previous step for all the rules that you want to define for this policy template.
- Click on the ‘OK’ button to save these changes and close the dialog.
Applying a policy template
If you want to apply a policy template to just one device, you can simply follow these steps:
- Open the Xian Io console.
- Right click over the desired device and then click on the ‘apply policy template’ context menu option.
- On the confirmation dialog, make sure that the ‘Link the device with the policy template’ checkbox is selected and then click on the ‘Yes’ button.
If you want to apply a policy template to several devices at the same time, just perform this simple procedure:
- Open the Xian Io console.
- Click on the ‘Policy Templates’ button.
- Select the policy template you want to apply to your devices from the tree view displayed at the left side of the Xian Io console.
- Right click on the policy template and then click on the ‘Apply’ context menu option.
- Select all the devices you want to apply the template to and then click on the ‘OK’ button.
- As in the previous case, verify that the ‘Link the device with the policy template’ checkbox is selected on the confirmation dialog box.
Editing a policy template
If after creating and applying your policy template you find that there is a need for adding, removing or modifying the settings of any rules, you only need to access the policy template, perform the necessary modifications and then propagate the changes to all the rules running on your devices and that are linked to the templates:
- Open the Xian Io console and click on the ‘Policy Templates’ button.
- Double click on the template you want to modify so the ‘Policy template properties’ dialog will be displayed and you will be able to add new rules, remove current rules or modify them by double clicking on any desired rule displayed on the list at the right.
- Once you have performed the desired changes, click on the ‘OK’ button.
- On the confirmation dialog, select the checkbox that states ‘Overwrite customized parameter(s) on the monitoring elements with the policy template configuration?’ and then click on the ‘Yes’ button.
Importing and exporting policy templates
In order to facilitate the migration from one environment to another, Xian Network Manager Io provides the user with the Import/Export functionality for Policy Templates. This allows you to export policy templates found in one server to a different server, saving you from having to recreate the policy templates in the servers that you want migrate to. Just follow these simple steps to export/import policy templates:
Exporting:
- Open the Xian Io console and click on the ‘Policy Templates’ button.
- Right click on the policy template you want to export and then click on the ‘Export’ context menu option.
- Provide the name and location of the file you are exporting the template to and then click on ‘Save’.
Importing:
- Open the Xian Io console and click on the ‘Policy Templates’ button.
- Right click on the policy templates category where you want to import the policy template to and then click on the ‘Import’ option, look for the policy template file and then click on the ‘Open’ button.
As a result, Xian Io’s Linked Policy Templates feature allows you to have a predefined list of rules functioning on the network devices/servers of your choice in a matter of minutes and with little effort.
Should you have any questions/comments about this article, please feel free to reply to this post, and we’ll make sure to send you an answer as soon as possible. For further information on Xian Io for Ops Mgr 07 please visit our website www.jalasoft.com.
