Canonical Announced the General Availability of Canonical Landscape

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.