by Roberto Alcocer

For System Center Forum readers that might have missed our first blog posts, this is Jalasoft’s seventh 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, distributed applications with Xian Io and policy templates. On this article we are going to focus on Xian Network Manager Io’s UI integration.

Xian Network Manager Io (Xian Io) extends the OpsMgr 2007 monitoring capabilities to a heterogeneous environment so you could monitor your Windows servers along with your network devices and UNIX servers. The Xian Io UI integration features further extend the integration with OpsMgr since most of the Xian tasks, such as discovering, removing and configuring the rules to monitor network devices/servers can be executed directly from the OpsMgr monitoring console; therefore, there is no need to work with other windows besides the OpsMgr one.

To point up the seamless integration between Xian Io and Ops Mgr 07, we are going to show how to add, remove a device, and also view its properties, all from the Ops Mgr 07 monitoring console. First, perform the steps below to display the different types of operations that can be performed over Xian Io from Ops Mgr 07:

1. Open the OpsMgr 2007 console and click on the ‘Monitoring’ button.
2. Expand the ‘Monitoring > Xian Network Manager > Jalasoft Xian’ branch and select the ‘Diagram view’ node. Remember to import the Xian management packs before attempting this operation.
3. Select the child Jalasoft Xian environment (in this image it is called ‘DEMOOPSMGRXIAN’).

The ‘Actions’ pane will now display the commands applicable to Xian Network Manager Io.

Adding a new device:

1. Click on the ‘Add device’ task option of the Xian tasks displayed under the ‘Actions’ view. The following dialog will be displayed:

2. Select the device type you want to discover and then click on the ‘OK’ button. A discovery or ‘add device’ wizard will be displayed.

3. Provide with the information requested at the different tabs of the wizard and then click on the ‘Finish’ button.

After a couple of minutes the device will show under the corresponding folder within the OpsMgr console.

Removing a device:

1. Select the ‘Remove Device’ task from the ‘Actions’ pane. The following dialog will appear:

2. Check the device(s) you want to remove and then click on the ‘OK’ button.

Viewing the properties of any device.

The ‘device properties’ dialog associated to any device you are monitoring with Xian lets you add, remove or edit rules, Syslog filters and/or policy templates applied to it. This important dialog is also available directly from the OpsMgr console; you only need to perform the few simple steps described below:

1. Select the ‘View Device Properties’ task associated to your Xian environment from the ‘Actions’ pane. The following dialog will be displayed:

2. Select the device from which you want to see its properties and then click on the ‘OK’ button. The ‘device properties’ dialog will now show.

However, should you be in a hurry, a faster way to see the properties of any device that you are monitoring with Xian, consists on simply ‘right’ clicking on the device displayed under the state or diagram view and then selecting the ‘view device properties’ context menu option.

As you can see from our examples, Xian Io helps manage and monitor your network devices/servers conveniently from one console.

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.