[Xymon] Hand editing config files

[Isaac W Traxler]

Some folks have taken this thread to be a general what-if you could do 
this, so I have joined that group. I suspect some of the things I want 
already exist and Ihave not dicovered them yet or am to obtuse to figure 
out.


Comments about flat files vs GUI:
- Flat files certainly offer a lot of options
- A syntax checker would be nice
- A GUI might attract some folks, but it is more likely to remove
   flexibility for the rest of us
- Like others, I have been looking at generating the hosts.cfg file from
   data in racktables and additional custom tables
- Most of the current Xymon users chose Xymon because of its simplicity,
   light weight, flexible configuration and its extensibility -- would a
   change create a fork?

Database comments:
- What impact will it make on resources (xymon is frugral)
- What about databse crashes/recovery
- Will it improve performance
- Does it replace text files
- How many additional packages must be installed


Side note: I started monitoring with Big Brother many years ago. I made 
efforts with Nagios and Zabbix. I cam back to Xymon. Xymon is not perfect.
But it is light weight (Zabbix out ran my resources with a couple of dozen 
machines monitorred). It lives in a push or pull model (I am often amazed 
at how differently people implement Xymon). Xymon will do just about 
anything (I just need to be bright enough to write a script).


Features that I would like:
- better snmp support (some devices are basically only snmp)
- recent non-green page (only events that have happened in last
   configurable time period)
- disk graphs -- a way to indicate disk size changed (kind of like the
   arrows on a stock graph to indicate a split)
- column view -- the ability to pick 1 (maybe more columns) and see all
   machines for only that column
- A good way to handle events. Events happen and can easily generate a
   Xymon message. A good, consistent method for those events to go away,
   reset to green, or something would be nice. In particular, I (and
   others) have spent lots of time processing syslog messages. I could
   generate dozens of messages from syslog events. Unfortunately, most
   do not have a follow event to indicate the first event is over.
- Web content that was happy with iPhone/iPad
- Alternate web front end/dashboard. When trying to convince others
   of the value of Xymon I get beat up over the "dated" web look
   more than I the lack of GUI config or lack of database technology
   (in fairness I often hear folks complain about the lack of a database
   until the see how fast, efficient and low memory the Xymon design is).


Areas that I know can be done but I have not found the doc for yet:
- Rules to not page on events x,y,z if A is down
- Aggregation -- I would like to create a test that is the OR of
   several tests and display it as another column. Clicking on that column
   takes you to a page of the individual tests. Example: I have a number
   of DataDirect Network Controllers that I can poll and determine quite a
   few different errors. At first I tried a single DDN test and discovered
   I often missed a later important event becasue an earlier minor one had
   happened and I was ignoring the test. I have now separated the
   individual tests out (I currently have 9). A way to "macro" these
   together would be neat.


--
Isaac Traxler                             AIX,Linux Admin
Louisiana State University                traxler at lsu.edu
High Performance Computing                225-578-1923
LONI AIX Clusters
AIX, Linux Support
Storage and Infrastructure