[Xymon] why do you use xymon?

Ryan Novosielski novosirj at umdnj.edu
Wed Jun 13 16:06:45 CEST 2012


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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:
> 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 <ralphmitchell at gmail.com 
> <mailto:ralphmitchell at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> 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 <Ejones at egov.com 
> <mailto:Ejones at egov.com>> 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____
> 
> __ __
> 
> 
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> http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- "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
> 
> 
> 
> This body part will be downloaded on demand.


- -- 
- ---- _  _ _  _ ___  _  _  _
|Y#| |  | |\/| |  \ |\ |  | |Ryan Novosielski - Sr. Systems Programmer
|$&| |__| |  | |__/ | \| _| |novosirj at umdnj.edu - 973/972.0922 (2-0922)
\__/ Univ. of Med. and Dent.|IST/EI-Academic Svcs. - ADMC 450, Newark
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