[xymon] Customisation and Migration from BB->Xymon

[Ryan Novosielski]

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On 12/22/2010 09:12 AM, John Marks wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We are currently looking at moving from BB to xymon.
> 
> I've been wanting to move us over to Xymon for ages and am excited by
> the fact I finally have enough management backing to undertake the shift!
> 
> I've read as much as I can find and the discussion in
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/System_Monitoring_with_Xymon/Other_Docs/FAQ#Q._How_safe_is_it_to_migrate_to_Hobbit_from_BB_.3F
> was quite helpful in many ways, but I still have some questions that I'd
> like to ask....
> 
> We currently have a Operations center that gets to watch a couple of
> different monitoring products, BB being one of them.
> The BB implementation was historically customised in a couple of ways, 
> some of which can be dropped but a couple below would be significant to
> Operations.
> 
>  * Is there a way of displaying all currently RED or PURPLE (no Yellow)
> alerts without playing with the source? *
> Currently, operations only perform an escalation on RED/PURPLE alerts,
> so it seems that a hack was done to the bbgen/pagegen.c code that
> created the bbnk pages such that for ALL hosts it only displayed hosts
> which had Red or Purple alerts on them. Can something like this be done
> natively with Xymon without needing to configure each host separately?
> This almost looks like something the Critical Editor/view should be able
> to provide?

Perhaps I shouldn't comment on your operations, but I'm curious -- why
would you want to do this? Yellow alerts warn of upcoming red alerts in
many cases. I do not have yellow configured to page, just red and purple
(and that's probably the default). What's wrong with that scenario?

> * Is there a simple way to still have "unregistered" hosts show up in
> the "bb2" page? *
> The other one would be the fact that we often have new clients installed
> by the admins without the BB admin being informed expeditiously. With BB
> these would still show up in bb2.html. With the bbgen implementation, a
> method was found to provide a similar result, but it relies on the files
> in bbvar/logs to do it (which don't exist by default with Xymon).

Those clients will show up on the "Ghost Clients" list under reports on
the top-level menu. I am fairly certain they do not show up on bb2.html.
I can understand why that would be desirable to a certain extent, but I
think that this way does a good job. It has the added bonus of helping
you discover why you aren't seeing updates from a client that you think
has been properly configured -- sometimes you will see its hostname does
not match the hostname defined in Xymon. Actually, Solaris machines
appear to do this 100% of the time as uname -n does not return FQDN, but
my display server is configured to use all FQDN (mainly because BB
recommended it).

> Also any hints or tips about migration and/or migration approach would
> be great. Is there anything special about creating an "Active/Active"
> Xymon environment for redundancy?

Mainly the FQDN thing for clients. I don't know how AIX will do with
this, but I've mentioned Solaris. I don't do Active/Active so I can't
comment on that. Funny you should send this today -- I moved my
BBDISPLAY/BBNET/BBPAGER machines from BB to Xymon about 6 months ago,
and am just today going to remove the last wave of BB clients (replacing
them with Xymon clients).

Another couple of gotchas, if you are migrating at all like I did:

1) If BBPAGER is not the same as BBDISPLAY, I believe you will have to
make a change. I was never able to figure out how to separate them, if
indeed it is possible. This may not matter for you.
2) If you leave BB clients in place and migrate from BB to Xymon slowly
over time (which you can do), the centrally configured client settings
(eg. disable monitoring of the /mnt FS, etc.) will be ignored for any
client still running BB. I figured that the information coming in would
be correctly processed by the server as that's where the config option
is, but that's not what happened.

Anyhow, like I said, I went through this not all that long ago so if you
have any questions, let me know.

> About 1,000 entries in bb-hosts about 50% are Windows/Unix boxes and 50%
> network kit. One of the drivers for migration is an expectation of an
> additional 50-80% increase in servers through more intergration.
> Currently running BB 1.9c server (on AIX) with 1.9c clients on AIX, RHEL
> and a small amount of Solaris. Windows clients currently run a BB client
> of 1.08d.

I believe a real Xymon Windows client came out recently. I was going to
try it in the near future (we don't currently monitor any Windows).

> Using bbgen-3.6 to create the web pages.

> Operations alert on Red and Purple's the Yellows are currently used by
> the local support towers to do more pro-active fixes before Operations
> needs to escalate.

Perhaps the easiest would be then to just route yellow alert pages
differently, which I'm pretty sure is an easy task if I'm remembering my
documentation correctly. I don't do this (as I said, I don't page on
yellow at all), so I can't absolutely confirm.

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