Jalasoft has been creating great network monitoring and visualization tools on top of SCOM for years now and I have been working with them for a long time. They are quite active in creating new products and new versions of existing products, which evolve with customer demand and SCOM product updates. These weeks we are seeing a number of product updates:
Xian Network Manager 2012 SP2
A little less than 2 weeks ago Jalasoft announced the release of Xian Network Manager 2012 Service Pack 2. This latest version of the product supports SCOM 2012 R2. It features improvements to the Configuration Monitoring feature and adding support for the latest version of VMware Virtual Center. In addition, one of the main features called Netflow also got a lot of upgraded functionality and can handle V9 templates and adds dashboard improvements. Also it can now filter data to a top-N set to send to SCOM in order not to overflow SCOM with too much data which is marginal in importance.
More information on Xian Network Manager can be found here: http://www.jalasoft.com/xian/networkmanager
Xian Wings 2.0
The next thing to get exited about is that Jalasoft is releasing Xian Wings 2.0 this week. It will be released on Wednesday 30 October 2013! Xian Wings brings all kinds of SCOM views to your mobile and tab devices, including state, alerts, performance graphs, tasks and notifications. This is not limited to the Xian Network Manager objects in SCOM, but all objects. Now I am pleased to early-announce (with permission) some of the improvements in Wings 2.0:
Xian Wings HD for iPad
- Remote Shell: it is now possible to run PowerShell and cmd prompt commands directly from your iPad against the SCOM server or another computer. This means that additional tasks or actions can be directly done as a response to some alerts received in SCOM. I will surely be showing you what this looks like in one my upcoming blog posts.
- Notifications Widgets: besides alerts, states and performance graphs, it is now possible to add notifications widgets to any Wings dashboard. This widget will display a new notification object for each alert generated or modified on SCOM associated to any selected object within the scope of this particular widget.
Xian Wings for Windows Phone
- Full support for Windows phone 8: a new Xian Wings client for Windows phone 8 has been created in order to fully support this new version. Besides this latest version, Wings still supports phone 7 as well. It is very nice to see both versions of the Windows Phone OS are now supported.
Xian Wings for Android and iPhone
- Class icon for each monitored object: each monitored object now displays its associated type icon along with its status, making it easier to know which object has problems and what kind of component it is; for instance a database, computer or network device.
Xian Wings 2.0 Server
- The Xian Wings server now fully supports .Net Frameworks 4.5 in order to improve performance and compatibility with the latest Microsoft platforms and technologies.
- The Xian Wings server and/or console can now be installed on any computer running Windows 7 or 8.
More information on Xian Wings can be found here: http://www.jalasoft.com/xian/wings
Like I said this calls for an additional blog post on the possibilities of the latest Xian Wings 2.0 on my iPad mini. Stay tuned for that one to come in the near future!
Bob Cornelissen
