[Xymon] why do you use xymon?

[Vernon Everett]

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> 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> 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****
>>
>> ** **
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Xymon mailing list
>> Xymon at xymon.com
>> 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
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