[Xymon] Hand editing config files

[Tom Kauffman]

On Wednesday, June 13, 2012 05:04:10 PM Henrik Størner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> in another mail thread, another monitoring tool (Zenoss) was mentioned
> which had the advantage of “no hand editing of config files”.

> This is not going to happen anytime soon, but since the subject was up
> in the air - what do you think about it ? Is it a major problem that
> Xymon has all configuration in text files ? How many of you
> auto-generate the Xymon config by extracting the information from a
> database already ?
> 
> Just looking for some feedback...


Well - I've retired, so I don't have access to the source anymore - but I did 
a couple of nifty hacks based on the main config being text files.

I tagged the IBM RS-6000 Hardware Management Consoles with the tag HMC. On the 
xymon server I launched a script every 5 minutes to find the HMC(s) and run a 
query to determine the system names of the managed frames and the system names 
of the virtual servers running on them.

Then I built include files which were already coded into the main config. One 
that listed all the managed frames, and one for each managed frame to list all 
the virtual systems on the frame. At the same time, I built a cpu utilization 
summary value for the managed frame that was the sum of the virtual system's 
cpu usage and a memory utilization summary to match. We alerted on more than 7 
CPUs in use and went red on more than 7.5 CPUs in use (these were all 8 CPU 
systems)

The result was a group on our main display for the managed frames, followed by 
a group for each frame showing the systems on that frame at the time. As an 
aside, the partition mobility functionality in AIX and the HMC on Power 6 
hardware let us move an SAP/Oracle central instance serving 700 users from one 
frame to another without causing any issues for the users. Continuous pings to 
the system showed one (1) ping getting dropped in the entire process.

Later I did much the same for our VMware ESX systems and their clients. The 
last I heard, this is still in use.