History of Xymon¶
The application was inspired by the open-source version of Big Brother, a network monitoring application, and maintains backward compatibility with it. Between 2002 and 2004 Henrik Storner wrote an open-source software add-on called bbgen toolkit, then in March 2005 a stand-alone version was released called Hobbit. Versions of this were released between 2005 and 2008, but since a prior user of the trademark "Hobbit" existed, the tool was finally renamed Xymon. In January 2012, Quest Software discontinued development of Big Brother.
Source: "Xymon" on Wikipedia, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.
Origins: Big Brother (mid-1990s)¶
Around 1996, Sean MacGuire created "Big Brother" as a simple shell-based tool to monitor servers and services.
It used static HTML pages with red/green icons for status display, which was lightweight and scalable at the time.
Success led to code bloat, scalability issues, and eventual acquisition by Quest Software, which commercialized it.
bbgen Toolkit (2002–2004)¶
Henrik Storner, a Big Brother user since the late 1990s, faced performance limits in large environments.
From 2002 to late 2004, he developed the "bbgen toolkit," an open-source add-on for Big Brother that improved reporting and display efficiency while still relying on a Big Brother server.
Hobbit: Standalone Server (2005–2008)¶
On March 30, 2005, version 4.0 decoupled from Big Brother and was renamed "Hobbit," becoming the first full standalone monitoring server.
It remained compatible with Big Brother clients for easier migration in existing setups.
Later releases (4.1 in 2005, 4.2 in 2006) added a full Unix client and expanded features.
Renaming to Xymon¶
Due to "Hobbit" being a protected trademark, the project dropped the Tolkien reference and adopted "Xymon."
The name first appeared in a 4.2 patch around 2008; version 4.3.0 (2010) fully implemented the rename.
Xymon's Current Role¶
Xymon positions itself as Big Brother's successor, designed for small setups or thousands of hosts/services.
It combines C daemons and shell scripts with a classic red/yellow/green web UI, historical data, and SLA reporting via text files and RRD graphs.