why do you use xymon? 🔗 link

Would any of you mind telling me why you use xymon? I have a co-worker who is pushing hard for zenoss, and his arguments include "gui discovery tool", "no hand editing of config files", "it is an enterprise level monitoring system and you can buy support and bring in a consultant to set it up for you", and the ever popular "everyone is using zenoss now".

Elizabeth Jones

Jones, Elizabeth wrote:

GUI discovery tool is nice.
No Hand editing of config files is nice too.

If you're desperate to give people money, you can buy Big Brother
from Quest (hey, it's Xymon compatible!)

Buying support and consulting? - If you need it, I'm sure even
the original author of Big Brother could provide it... or any
number of people on the list.

Ultimately, I've found the best way to handle these situations
is to run the systems in parallel, monitoring the same things
at the same time.  Choose N systems.

A winner will emerge quite clearly, and I'm sure if you need
any help the list will prevail :)
-- 
Sean MacGuire                                 user-4915795a2617@xymon.invalid

Key West                                        +X XXX XXX XXXX
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -  Alan Kay

1)      Because we are a support group and we have no money

2)      Easy to configure external scripts custom scripts to monitor our applications, networks and operating systems, Solaris, Linux, AIX, HP, OpenVMS (Old BB client)

3)      Light weight, runs on 2 old PCs, slimline desktop PC's, that are a thousand years old but can run Xymon

4)      Because it's opensource easy to use freeware that we can afford

If we needed to buy support or a consultant to install it.  It would not be the tool for us.  We want something free, fast, easy to install and quick to customize, in other words Xymon.


~David

From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Jones, Elizabeth
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 20:46
To: Xymon at xymon.com
Subject: [Xymon] why do you use xymon?

Would any of you mind telling me why you use xymon? I have a co-worker who is pushing hard for zenoss, and his arguments include "gui discovery tool", "no hand editing of config files", "it is an enterprise level monitoring system and you can buy support and bring in a consultant to set it up for you", and the ever popular "everyone is using zenoss now".

Elizabeth Jones

It works.  It's cost effective.  It's lightweight.

It fits my needs and environment.

If you need the average user (not able to edit text files) then you'll
need to find a solution to that, Zenoss may be one option.  The other
would be to edit the bb-hosts (hosts.cfg) with the hobbitadmintools
(which may have been renamed to xymonadmintools at this point).  The
question is what problem is the co-worker trying to solve?

Josh Luthman
Office: XXX-XXX-XXXX
Direct: XXX-XXX-XXXX
XXXX Wayne St
Suite XXXX
Troy, OH XXXXX


On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 9:01 PM, Gore, David W (David)

<user-368fd67cc6bd@xymon.invalid> wrote:

I'm familiar with an educational organization that uses Big Brother
(Quest) and has not been pleased with their support at all, to say the
least.

This list has provided excellent support for me using Xymon.  Didn't
even cost beer money, it was simply offered.

Josh Luthman
Office: XXX-XXX-XXXX
Direct: XXX-XXX-XXXX
XXXX Wayne St
Suite XXXX
Troy, OH XXXXX

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 8:58 PM, Sean MacGuire <user-4915795a2617@xymon.invalid> wrote:

Josh Luthman wrote:

Josh, that really sucks.  If you pass along their details I'll
see if I can help.  Even though I'm no longer with Quest, I don't
like that a user isn't happy with their support.  Feel free to
contact me offline - email is in the footer.

Of course, that was probably one of the biggest issues we had;
that we never heard about stuff like this when it happened.

That's what lists are for :)

-- 
Sean MacGuire                                 user-4915795a2617@xymon.invalid

Key West                                        +X XXX XXX XXXX
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -  Alan Kay

I will speak to my contact and advise that you may be able to help.
Thank you for the assistance! =)

Josh Luthman
Office: XXX-XXX-XXXX
Direct: XXX-XXX-XXXX
XXXX Wayne St
Suite XXXX
Troy, OH XXXXX

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 9:51 PM, Sean MacGuire <user-4915795a2617@xymon.invalid> wrote:

From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Sean MacGuire [user-4915795a2617@xymon.invalid]
If you need it, I'm sure even the original author of Big Brother could provide it.
Sean MacGuire                                 

That's a pretty good reason right there!  I'm not sure how many will pick up on that  :)

Folks that depend on vendor support for tool xyz often find themselves at the mercy of said vendor when shtf.  I can offer several reasons why I've used BB->Hobbit->XyMon for over the past ~15 years but it sounds like your co-worker has already made the decision to use some other product.  

I think I'll make some popcorn and ponder this for some time.....

Hi Elizabeth

I use Xymon specifically because it doesn't have the features you listed.
I am not confined by what the "discovery tool" thinks it has found, nor
what it believes the config should be.
Ask any power user on this list, and you will find we have done some crazy
shit to "fool" xymon into monitoring things it was never really designed to
monitor, using data from multiple places in ways that shouldn't make sense.
That said, if I could get Xymon to do it, then it was obviously designed to
do it. :-)
By being able to manipulate the configs in any way I choose, I have more
flexibility, and monitoring is not limited to what the product dev team
thinks I need.
I am limited only by my own creativity, imagination and scripting ability.

To illustrate this concept, get your fan-boy to have a look at what's on
Xymonton.
If Zenoss can do all of that, he might have an argument.

There's also the advantage of price.

And as for support, post a request for support on this list, and you will
receive a few private emails from people offering their services.
There are a number of people out there offering Xymon support, and I am
prepared to wager it's better than you can expect from Zenoss.
And while we are on the subject of support, does Zenoss give you direct
access to the developers? Hi Henrik. :-)

My suggestion, offer to trial Xymon for three months - it's not going to
cost you anything. Most managers are happy with free trials. (But get in
quick, before Zenoss offers a "free trial")
After 1 or 2 months, you will be aware of any gaps in your monitoring
scope, and I am sure most of us on this list will try and help fill those
gaps.
After 3 months, ask them what Zenoss can do for a price that you are not
already doing for free?
Then ask them why they want to waste budget on reinventing the wheel?

Regards
      Vernon

On 13 June 2012 08:45, Jones, Elizabeth <user-f0dffc744f19@xymon.invalid> wrote:

-- 

"While it is futile to try to eliminate risk, and questionable to try to
minimize it, it is essential that the risks taken be the right risks. "
- Peter F. Drucker

I took a quick look at the Zenoss community page, and fairly quickly
noticed one interesting thing - apparently it's agentless.   No agent to
install on target systems, because it picks up information using SNMP.
 That's not necessarily bad, but some companies don't like it.  Or you can
use "zencommand" to run nagios binaries on your target.  That info is dated
May 2008, so maybe it grew up since?

Right now I'm running a somewhat modified xymon client out of cron on AIX,
RHEL and SuSE systems, delivering reports over https on port 443 (which is
open anyway) instead of opening port 1984.  It doesn't use any compiled
binaries other than the standard system commands, which means that I don't
have to recompile for system updates.  Bourne shell all the way...  :-)

My situation may be unique, though - we have to comply with both PCI *and*
DIACAP requirements.

Ralph Mitchell

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Jones, Elizabeth <user-f0dffc744f19@xymon.invalid> wrote:

Would any of you mind telling me why you use xymon?

1.	It's amazingly simple to use.  2.	Something that irritates me about most monitoring systems, although I'm not familiar with zenoss, is that they don't keep trending data, Xymon does.
3.	Client OS agnostic
4.	What the heck is wrong with editing text files?  Did that fall out of vogue when I wasn't looking? 4 1/2.	All of its configuration is in text files instead of being buried in nine pages of GUI wizards
5.	Highly customizable, as in external scripts and utilities are very, very easy to add
6.	Excellent documentation
7.	Very active community who are very willing to help (provided you read the man pages), and who come up with great external scripts.
8.	clientless monitoring is possible (albeit limited, but you can still make sure your website is up!)


Jamison Maxwell
user-87d336c3dce6@xymon.invalid

-----Original Message-----
From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Josh Luthman
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 9:22 PM
To: Sean MacGuire
Cc: Xymon at xymon.com
Subject: Re: [Xymon] why do you use xymon?

I'm familiar with an educational organization that uses Big Brother
(Quest) and has not been pleased with their support at all, to say the least.

This list has provided excellent support for me using Xymon.  Didn't even cost beer money, it was simply offered.

Josh Luthman
Office: XXX-XXX-XXXX
Direct: XXX-XXX-XXXX
XXXX Wayne St
Suite XXXX
Troy, OH XXXXX


On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 8:58 PM, Sean MacGuire <user-4915795a2617@xymon.invalid> wrote:

Agentless?
That's funny.
That's OK for Windows, which seems to like sending everything and the
kitchen sink out in SNMP, but have you tried monitoring Solaris with SNMP?
Consider Sparc hardware, running LDOMs, with zones in the LDOMs. (Not an
unusual mix - I have a number of clients doing this)
I have yet to see an "auto-discovery" monitoring tool come even close to
getting it right.
Disks, most times, but for anything else beyond the "standard" stuff,
forget it.
I did witness one priceless example where one of these "auto-discovery"
monitors announced, and started monitoring and graphing an MS-SQL database
it discovered on a Solaris Sparc server.
Sales guy left with his tail between his legs.

I set up Xymon a few years back at a local oil and gas company. A few
hundred nodes, a healthy mix of Solaris, Linux and Windows, filers, mass
storage, network devices, apps monitoring, database monitoring, the works.
Besides the usual Xymon interfaces, I had also set up specific pages to
provide application-centric views, allowing application custodians to
monitor a single page giving them a complete view of the health of their
application with associated dependencies listed on their page.
Since I left, nearly three years ago now, they have tried (more for
political reasons than technical) to replace Xymon three times.
They still use Xymon :-)

I have yet to see agentless work properly.

Just my tuppence worth.

Regards
    Vernon


On 13 June 2012 11:03, Ralph Mitchell <user-00a5e44c48c0@xymon.invalid> wrote:

-- 
"While it is futile to try to eliminate risk, and questionable to try to
minimize it, it is essential that the risks taken be the right risks. "
- Peter F. Drucker

I recently had to deploy a (commercial) monitoring system based on SNMP.  It was quite fun since we had removed all traces of SNMPd years back from all client systems.  None of the custom scripts that were deployed over the years for XyMon would fit that mold, resulting in a monitoring system that did not give the systems folks what they needed to do their jobs effectively.   Fortunately, I left our XyMon servers and client binaries running in the background.  

Having the ability to customize and tune your monitoring system is priceless.  Those canned systems just don't allow that flexibility, and waking up to some annoying false/worthless alert at 0300 for a few days/weeks may help in the decision making process to choose an Open Source system.

From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Ralph Mitchell [user-00a5e44c48c0@xymon.invalid]
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 8:03 PM
To: Jones, Elizabeth
Cc: Xymon at xymon.com
Subject: Re: [Xymon] why do you use xymon?

I took a quick look at the Zenoss community page, and fairly quickly noticed one interesting thing - apparently it's agentless.   No agent to install on target systems, because it picks up information using SNMP.  That's not necessarily bad, but some companies don't like it.  Or you can use "zencommand" to run nagios binaries on your target.  That info is dated May 2008, so maybe it grew up since?

Right now I'm running a somewhat modified xymon client out of cron on AIX, RHEL and SuSE systems, delivering reports over https on port 443 (which is open anyway) instead of opening port 1984.  It doesn't use any compiled binaries other than the standard system commands, which means that I don't have to recompile for system updates.  Bourne shell all the way...  :-)

My situation may be unique, though - we have to comply with both PCI *and* DIACAP requirements.

Ralph Mitchell


On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Jones, Elizabeth <user-f0dffc744f19@xymon.invalid<mailto:user-f0dffc744f19@xymon.invalid>> wrote:
Would any of you mind telling me why you use xymon? I have a co-worker who is pushing hard for zenoss, and his arguments include “gui discovery tool”, “no hand editing of config files”, “it is an enterprise level monitoring system and you can buy support and bring in a consultant to set it up for you”, and the ever popular “everyone is using zenoss now”.

Elizabeth Jones

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 11:01 PM, Vernon Everett

<user-b3f8dacb72c8@xymon.invalid>wrote:

Crazy...  Yeah...  At EDS I had a script that would go to each of
Travelocity's backend web servers, login as a user and go through the whole
process of searching for a flight from Tulsa to Dallas.  Another script
went to a couple of load-balanced American Airlines web sites and verified
that all of the servers were available *without* being able to touch each
one individually.  At one point I had about 3000 reports being generated by
various scripts running from cron, at intervals ranging from 30 seconds to
24 hours, all on a single-cpu, 733MHz DL380 with 512Mb ram.

 [snip]

Say Hi to Sean MacGuire too, one of the authors of Xymon's ancestor - Big
Brother!

Ralph Mitchell

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Jamison Maxwell

<user-87d336c3dce6@xymon.invalid>wrote:

Actually, it should be possible to cat (most of) the xymon client script
through ssh to a client system and feed the resulting client output to
xymon.  The *only* thing you need on the client side is a userid with ssh
keys from the xymon server.  I haven't actually tried that with xymon, but
it definitely worked with Big Brother back in the day.

Ralph Mitchell

We came to Hobbit/Xymon from a NimBUS install my predecessors had set up (yuck!), and I came from a small part of a certain large now-defunct hardware and software vendor that used BB internally (until they made us use our own horrid monitoring product). When the upgrade bill came from Nimsoft in '07, I told them to blow it out their ear and I told my boss that we could do a better job for free. And so we did. 
It runs on all of the clients we've had so far, it monitors our Oracle databases without too much effort, I wrote an interface to OpenManage to pick up hardware/storage status in both Windows and Linux, and when we needed temperature monitoring, it wasn't a stretch to pull ambient temperature sensor data from the Dells into Hobbit. 
I think the phrase "everything you want, nothing you don't" applies here. 
----- Original Message -----

From: "Elizabeth Jones" <user-f0dffc744f19@xymon.invalid> To: Xymon at xymon.com Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 5:45:35 PM Subject: [Xymon] why do you use xymon? 

Would any of you mind telling me why you use xymon? I have a co-worker who is pushing hard for zenoss, and his arguments include “gui discovery tool”, “no hand editing of config files”, “it is an enterprise level monitoring system and you can buy support and bring in a consultant to set it up for you”, and the ever popular “everyone is using zenoss now”. 
---------- Elizabeth Jones

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 08:45:35PM -0400, Jones, Elizabeth wrote:

hi,

1) performance! We use xymon for three years. Now we have over 18000 sensors.
We check over 5000 network services every minute. All incidents are send to
the postgresql. In postgresql is now over 1000000 incidents. And all this is
running on core2duo (2 cores) with 4GB ram. On this machine runs webapp
to handle incidents in postgresql. Unbelievable :-).
Nagios with the same hw configuration didn't work with one third of the sensors.
On other side we don't use rrd/graphical function of xymon.
Version 4.2.3.

2) easy customization, code is easy to read ... (thanks Henrik :-))

3) easy writing of the new sensors. You can send more info in sensor message
(include hints how to solve the issue :-))

4) etc, etc...

Best regards,

-- 
Milan Kocian

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I have not TRIED to monitor Solaris, but I did find out that some of
our Solaris machines would send out a ton of stuff over SNMP if asked.
So I think it is quite possible on Solaris. However, you're almost
certainly not going to find any way to monitor specific things like
RAID cards via vendor binaries or the like over SNMP. So while
"agentless monitoring" is a plus over SNMP, you're nearly never going
to be able to get everything you're interested in getting, meaning
you're installing an agent anyway and why bother with SNMP?

On 06/12/2012 11:19 PM, Vernon Everett wrote:

:-)

This body part will be downloaded on demand.

- -- - ---- _  _ _  _ ___  _  _  _
|Y#| |  | |\/| |  \ |\ |  | |Ryan Novosielski - Sr. Systems Programmer
|$&| |__| |  | |__/ | \| _| |user-ae4522577e16@xymon.invalid - 973/972.0922 (2-0922)
\__/ Univ. of Med. and Dent.|IST/EI-Academic Svcs. - ADMC 450, Newark
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAk/YnnUACgkQmb+gadEcsb60igCeMVSFWvdflGtkbZU4gIojl8rT
fZIAn091r2bl7jUXksbapnAVXB7vNxkX
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*snip*

Ralph Mitchell

This always kind of bugs me when discussions on monitoring systems come
up, or specifically when trying to get Xymon adopted...

"Agentless" doesn't really mean agentless. snmpd is an agent -- just as
much a daemon as xymonlaunch -- and with a much more complicated
configuration file if you want to extend and expand what it's doing.


And while computers like dealing with OIDs, running 'xymon "query hostname
disk"' is a heck of a lot easier for a human to do.


If you can get the discussion in terms of either "which agent is easier to
manage on the system to do what we need to do", or polling vs. pushing
generally, you might have more avenues of approach.


HTH,

-jc

On 13-06-2012 05:01, Vernon Everett wrote:

Hi.

(Sorry, couldn't resist :-))


Regards,
Henrik

The thing that makes the big difference to me is how easy it is to hook
into Xymon. It makes it easier for your tool to match your business rather
than having to force your business processes to match your tool. I've
created several addons to Xymon to make it is easier to use in our
environment. The ease you can access the Xymon's internal data
(xymondboard) and tap into Xymon's data streams (xymond_channel) make
writing such things fairly easy. A couple of rabble-rousers at my place of
work were agitating for a move to Nagios a while back so I had to look at
Nagios fairly closely, and it would have been a nightmare duplicating that
functionality in Nagios. I suspect Xenoss would be even worse, any changes
or additions you want would probably have to be done by Xenoss' developers,
on their schedule (and budget).

Another think I really like about Xymon is its lack of polling, all the
internal data is pushed from the clients, this makes it a much easier sell
to security types.

Thanks,
Larry Barber

On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Henrik Størner <user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid> wrote:

Xymon at xymon.com<

Hi,

I second all these points, and would like to add some more:

I don't know any other solution where I'm able to rollout the client agent
without root rights.
We created a script to rollout and configure the base Xymon agent without
any root access (only the user must be there), including a cronjob to check
and start the client, inserting the ssh keys and so on.
No /etc/init.d entry or so. 30 seconds job.

Even our DMZ hosted clients work over a ssh tunnel and port forwarding via
ssh port 22. No extra hole in firewall, no entry in /etc/services.

And one more point: I would never trust a monitoring solution where I
cannot see an only demo. Sometimes I can find some nice screenshots, but
never this kind of live system view like xymon.com!

such a great product with a great community

Norbert

I use Xymon because I started using Big Brother years ago when it was
way ahead of its time.  I continue to use Xymon because it continues to
be a valuable tool and is easily extendable and extremely flexible.  

You would probably be surprised by the number of vendors who have been
amazed by the amount of data we capture and track across the wide
variety of devices on our network.  Also how easy it is to flip from
looking at temperatures and humidity in our network closets to the
number of users connecting to our ERP system throughout a given day.  On
top of all that, it finds issues and alerts the proper staff to take
action, no matter when they occur.  

We use devmon to monitor our network devices which are best designed for
monitoring via SNMP (which is where it got its start), clients to
monitor our servers, and custom scripts using a whole host of tools to
monitor all kinds of other things.    

I think the advice you got about getting xymon in and getting a demo
started right away is the best you have been given.  That is precisely
what I did at my current location.  I was able to do it because there
were no license fees.  After it was up and running, had already found
issues, and had sent out alerts when something failed, it had pretty
much proven its worth.  The  talk of other tools died quickly.
Especially when it came time to put together proposals for money from
already tight budgets.

   .....Bruce
  

 
Bruce White
Senior Enterprise Systems Engineer | Phone: X-XXX-XXX-XXXX | Fax: XXX-XXX-XXXX | user-58f975e8bf9d@xymon.invalid | http://www.fellowes.com/
 
 
 
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