Landscape - Changing the way you manage your systems

Download the datasheet Landscape is an easy-to-use systems management and monitoring service that allows you to manage multiple Ubuntu machines as easily as one through a simple Web-based interface. The Landscape service provides powerful, automated systems administration capabilities such as management, monitoring and provisioning of packages across multiple machines lowering your per-systems cost of management and administration. Because Landscape is Web-based, it is easy to set up and use and requires no special hardware or specialised skills. View the landscape datasheet for even more details.

Manage and monitor your systems with Landscape

Landscape simplifies the complex task of monitoring and administrating multiple servers by enabling IT administrators to manage multiple machines through a single Web-based interface. At its most basic level, Landscape securely enables updates and provisioning of packages across multiple (stand-alone or virtual) machines. In addition, Landscape provides a host of additional monitoring, user control, process management, inventory control and support enhancement tools that can help increase your productivity immediately.

Landscape software as a service

 

Basic architecture model for Landscape. Each of your systems connects to the Internet and securely exchanges information about packages and system operational parameters with the central Landscape servers. Ubuntu packages are then downloaded directly from the Ubuntu respository.

Systems management

Tracking and updating system configurations is one of the most time consuming tasks for IT administrators. The ability to quickly view detailed configuration information, histories, updates and enforce standardisation between systems is key to simplifying the job of diagnosing, auditing and ensuring compliance. Landscape provides a simple Web interface to view key system parameters, updates and packages that are deployed to each system or group of systems. Landscape simplifies your everyday work load by letting you create scripts that automate routine work such as starting and stopping services, performing backups and profiling hardware.

  • Manage many machines at once - All operations in Landscape can be applied to one or more machines with the same ease.

  • Group machines to match your needs - Not all machines need to form a single group. You can split machines into multiple groups for different requirements but all can be administered through a single interface.

  • Manage packages across the network - Landscape allows you to see a package inventory for each computer and allows administrators to install, upgrade, or remove packages from one or more computers.

  • Integrate custom repositories - If you maintain your own repository, even internally, Landscape can report on and use the packages in it.

  • Manage users easily - Users from one or more systems may all be managed from a central interface 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 systems - Systems that are disconnected from the network will be properly handled when they next get on-line.

The dashboard gives you the status of all your systems and any active alerts via a simple Web interface. You can manage administrators, view packages by computer or group or run scripts which automate those error prone routine tasks.

Systems monitoring

Landscape provides monitoring of systems through an agent installed on each machine. The agent communicates with Landscape to provide up-to-the-minute status on machine metrics. All data is securely collected and stored in the Landscape database where administrators can access it from anywhere to analyse performance of key parameters over time. Landscape includes a graphical module that makes it easy to plot trends of temperature, disk and memory usage, system load or even custom metrics over time. Finally, Landscape keeps you informed: with alerts you will be quickly notified by email when critical patches are available so you don’t have to log in to check on update status.

  • Quickly understand system resource usage - Landscape constantly monitors your system’s health and performance, and graphs that data in ways that let you quickly pinpoint bottlenecks or other problem areas. See Fig 3.

  • Custom trend information - Now you can customise the display of the parameters that you need to know.

  • Beyond the standard operational graphs that are included in Landscape, you can now write a simple script to graph system parameters you want to view.

  • System info tool - A new tool updates the status of your system information at sign in meaning you no longer have to manually look for this data, saving you time.

  • Manage processes centrally - A simple Web interface shows you all the recently active processes running across all your systems and lets you 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.

  • 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

Landscape simplifies your support experience by automating the tedious task of relaying system information to our support experts. With your permission, you can send system information directly to our support team to help them more rapidly analyse your issues and get your system back up and running.

  • Streamline exchange of information with the Canonical support team - Our 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 your management needs in a single convenient location.

How do I get Landscape?

Landscape is free of charge to all of Canonical’s support customers. As part of your annual subscription you are allowed unlimited access to this powerful tool that will reduce the cost of ownership in your Linux environment significantly. Landscape is also available by subscription for those who do not require support contracts.  Subscription to the Landscape service is priced at $150 per node per year.