XenServer Application

The XenServer application provides monitoring and visualization of the information that is collected from XenServer Hosts. This data is submitted to your GoToAssist search index where you can search against it. Use the XenServer application to discover, track, search, and visualize VMs and their resource capacity and consumption in CPU, memory, storage, and network.

Note: You must first install the XenServer application before you can access and use it.

Topics in this article:

Set Up the XenServer Application

Create a Smart Group of your XenServer Hosts

Schedule Scans of your XenServer Hosts

Set Up the XenServer Application

The XenServer application uses a XenServer plugin in the Crawler to gather data from your XenServer hosts. To set up the application, you must first provide the plugin with the correct credentials using the following process.

To configure the XenServer plugin

1. Set up the GoToAssist Crawler (if you haven't already done so).

2. Click the Crawler icon in your computer's system tray and select Configure Crawler from the pop-up menu.

3. In the GoToAssist Configuration window, select the Credentials tab and click Add.

4. In the Configure Credentials window, select XenServer from the Protocol drop-down menu.

5. Follow the instructions listed below each text field, and then click OK (in the Limit Credential Use section, you can choose to select which devices this credential applies to by selecting the section option and clicking Add).

Note: If you have multiple XenServer pools with different credentials, you will need to add additional credentials to the GoToAssist Crawler so that it can communicate with all of your XenServer hosts.

6. Back on the GoToAssist Configuration window, click Apply or OK.

7. Create a Smart Group and schedule scans of your XenServer hosts to ensure that the correct hosts are scanned and then proper information is collected.

Note: By providing the XenServer plugin the credentials to scan your XenServer hosts, Monitoring will be able to gather and index the data. By default, the GoToAssist Crawler will not automatically gather configuration and performance information from your XenServer hosts. You will need to create a schedule to configure your GoToAssist Crawler to gather this information from your XenServer hosts.

Create a Smart Group of your XenServer Hosts

In order to intelligently attempt to gather data from XenServer hosts on your network you need to be able to tell the GoToAssist Crawler which hosts to probe. Luckily the GoToAssist service will automatically identify which hosts it has probed are XenServer hosts. Follow this set of steps to creat a "smart group" in the GoToAssist Inventory application to collect the set of XenServer hosts in to a group that will be automatically updates as XenServer hosts are discovered on your network.

In the Monitoring pull-down menu under the Applications header, click Inventory:

In the Inventory application click the Edit Groups link at the bottom of the Groups pane:

Click on the Create Group button and enter in a name for your group. Something like XenServers to make it easy to remember:

Click the Edit Group button with the newly created group selected:

Select the Smart Group toggle and enter the text

system/computed_model like 'XenServer%' or system/model like 'XenServer%'

in to the Member Test box and click Save:

NOTE: It may take up to a day for GoToAssist to crawl the networks you configured and identify any XenServer hosts on your network. So the smart group you create may appear to be empty at first. It should fill up with all of the discovered XenServer hosts in a day.

Schedule Scans of your XenServer Hosts

By default, the GoToAssist Crawler will not automatically gather configuration and performance information from your XenServer hosts. You will need to create a schedule in the GoToAssist Crawlers application to configure your GoToAssist Crawler to gather this information from your XenServer hosts.

We created the XenServer smart group in the previous step to make this process simpler and also have it dynamically include any new XenServer hosts you install on your network. This will allow you to gather rich configuration and performance information for all of your XenServer hosts.

In the Monitoring pull-down menu under the Applications header, click Crawlers link:

First we are going to create a schedule to regularly gather the configuration information from your XenServers. Click the Add Schedule button:

Name your first schedule "XenServer Configuration", set its Frequency to 1 hour.

NOTE: You should not set the frequency to be less than once an hour. This is a fairly intensive scan of all of the configuration information your XenServer that is not going to change very often. Ranges from once an hour to once a day are good here.

Click the Add Plugin button and select the XenServer Configuration Plugin in the popup list and click Save.

After selecting the XenServer Configuration Plugin select the Devices & Groups tab and in this tab click on the Add Group or Address button.

In the popup window that will come up make sure that the Address type selection is set to Group and look through the list of groups for the XenServer group you created above.

NOTE: be sure to click the Save button to finish creating your schedule.

After you have created the XenServer Configuration schedule create a new schedule. However name this one XenServer Performance. In this schedule set the frequency to 5 minutes and have this schedule use the XenServer Performance Plugin.

NOTE: The XenServer Performance plugin gathers only performance information from all of your XenServer hosts and virtual machines. It is efficient and you want to run it once every 5 minutes so you can get real time performance data.

NOTE: Be sure to select the same XenServer group under the Devices & Groups tab so that you are gathering performance data for all of your XenServer hosts.

| Views: 2200 | Last Updated: Thu, May 09 2013 2:28 PM

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