Devmon / MRTG

a) I've implemented devmon, my very small and resource strapped client is
very happy... I'm still in the process of working the bugs out. devmon
appears to go purple (and all reports dependent on it) periodically, and
then not come back... did that last time I was here, wasn't sure what caused
it. Just did it a few minutes ago. Wasn't sure what caused it, and was too
distracted and tired to carefully trace out what I did to fix it again
(stopped, started devmon, xymon, and manually ran devmon) after it was
working for most of three hours.
I really need an Ubuntu specific init.d script. Ubuntu's use of upstart in
hardy means that the "status" command, for instance, is dependent on stuff
in /etc/event.d to work, and I really don't want to have to manually
re-create all that... surely someone else is running devmon on a Debian
derivative, and has a functional initialization script?

b) I've begun to implement weathermap. I'm trying to figure out a rational
process for creating a map of our small network... the weathermap.conf
example appears to have been generated using php-weathermap... do I really
need to implement that, so I get the editor for it?

Thomas

On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 7:49 AM, Buchan Milne <user-9b139aff4dec@xymon.invalid>wrote:

On Friday, 14 August 2009 15:08:33 user-2e62ad6fd761@xymon.invalid wrote:

Hi,

Could I get a quick-and-dirty explanation regarding the Devmon
implementation in Xymon 4.3.x?

Nothing has changed regarding Devmon in Xymon 4.3.x.

However, Xymon itself has some basic native SNMP support, which is new in
4.3.x.

The way I understand it, Devmon provides SNMP capabilities to Xymon so
the
monitoring server can poll SNMP capable devices.

How is this different to Integrating MRTF data into XYMON, for example?

Devmon only polls devices, does conversion and formatting of data, which it
then sends to Xymon as a normal status message. A devmon RRD collector is
now
shipped with Xymon (as of 4.2.2), that allows RRD graphs to be created by
Xymon for any test/template that includes data intended for this purpose
(using the rrd option to the TABLE operator in the template file on the
devmon
side), if the test is mapped to use this collector (in the TEST2RRD
variable
in hobbitserver.cfg).

Besides the graphs, devmon will also change the "colour" of the tests based
on
thresholds, allowing you to alert on SNMP data (including non-graph data).

If I am interesting in getting bandwidth for various device interfaces, I
am assuming it is best to do via Devmon rather than integrate MRTG?

I think it is probably easier to get bandwidth graphs up with Devmon than
with
MRTG, and alerts based on link utilisation will be available out-the-box.

Lastly, is there a readme / howto that explains devmon-xymon setup?

If you're on a distro that provides devmon, it is more or less a matter of:

# $install devmon

(where install=urpmi for Mandriva, or $install="yum install" on RHEL or
CentOS
if you have added the repo at e.g.
http://staff.telkomsa.net/packages/rhel5/xymon)

# vi /etc/devmon.cfg

(set your SNMP community strings in the SNMPCIDS variable, the others
should
have adequate defaults)

# /etc/init.d/devmon readbbhosts

# /etc/init.d/devmon start


If you're adventurous, you could add the weathermap (see
http://staff.telkomsa.net/~bgmilne/xymon/).

If you're not on a distro with packages available, please see the
INSTALLATION
and USING files shipped in the docs directory.

Regards,
Buchan