14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical, Ubuntu's main commercial sponsor, announced today the availability of Canonical Landscape, its systems management and monitoring tool for Ubuntu.
Landscape will be available for its commercial support customers and as a standalone commercial service. It will offer, to the increasing number of businesses that are deploying multiple instances of Ubuntu on servers and desktops, the necessary means for a much easier way to manage and maintain their systems.
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, said: "We are committed to making Ubuntu the right choice for business. I am delighted that the feedback from the beta programme indicates that Landscape meets that commitment. We challenged the development team to build a tool that was simple to use but powerful for support customers and they delivered. I expect Landscape to drive many more large-scale Ubuntu deployments."
Fredrik Jonsson of ASCI Sweden AB, a participant in the beta programme, added: "We have been very impressed by what we have seen in Landscape. Ubuntu already has an impressive reputation for ease of use, and the growing ecosystem of packages available makes it a great choice for businesses today. Landscape looks like the ideal tool for both managing and monitoring business-scale deployments."
Here are the features of Landscape:
System Management Features:
￭ Manage many machines at once: All operations in Landscape can be applied to one or more machines with the same ease. ￭ Group machines: Not all machines need to form a single group, machines can be split into multiple groups for different requirements but all can be administered through a single interface. ￭ Manage packages across the network: Landscape allows the user to see a package inventory for each computer and allow administrators to install, upgrade, or remove packages from one or more computers. Integrate custom repositories: For users maintaining their own repository -- even internally -- Landscape can report on and manage the packages in it. ￭ Manage users easily: System users may all be managed from a central interface, and may have actions delivered to be performed in one or more systems in a comfortable way. ￭ Handle security updates efficiently: Landscape highlights those package upgrades with security fixes (with links to detailed information) ensuring any vulnerabilities are dealt with as quickly as possible. ￭ Support disconnected users: Users who disconnect from the network can be handled asynchronously with updates provided when they next get online.
System Monitoring Features:
￭ Understand system resource usage quickly: Landscape constantly monitors the system's health and performance, and graphs that data in ways that enable a user to quickly pinpoint bottlenecks or other problem areas. ￭ Manage processes centrally: A simple web interface displays all the recently active processes running across all systems and enables users to search and manage those centrally. ￭ Maintain a detailed hardware inventory: Landscape removes the complexity from hardware inventory by showing complete and easy to understand hardware information for all your systems. ￭ Simplify security audits: Auditing and security are simplified with Landscape's detailed history logs that display actions performed by all administrators, even if they were performed locally on the machines themselves without using Landscape. ￭ Access full package information: The convenient web interface allows browsing of all packages installed, available, and available for upgrading, on all registered machines, including security notices.
Enhanced Support Experience:
￭ Streamline exchange of information with the Canonical support team: Canonical support experts receive read-only information on hardware and configurations that will allow them to more rapidly diagnose and resolve tickets. ￭ Access the integrated support portal: Administrators can log, view and track support cases right in Landscape, thus providing all management needs in a single convenient location.