[Xymon] xymon as a drop-in bb replacement

[Deiss, Mark]

Nuts - guess that means the Quest/former Deadcat repository of all the BB-based user contributions will be vaporized at some point per BBPE EOL. Maybe Mr. Croteau/Quest can " transfer" the content back under the wings of Mr. MacGuire/somebody? This code base should be all GPL and not hamstrung by any Quest licensing restrictions.

Hmm, maybe Mr. Croteau and Mr. MacGuire will get back together again with something like "Big Second-Cousin-Once-Removed's Second-Coming"

-----Original Message-----
From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Henrik Størner
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 5:20 AM
To: xymon at xymon.com
Subject: Re: [Xymon] xymon as a drop-in bb replacement

On 18-03-2013 19:55, John Thurston wrote:
> We ran BB 1.9 for years, then switched to BBPE about three years ago.
> Earlier this month, Quest announced end-of-life for BBPE so we're 
> looking at our options.

I heard about this from Sean MacGuire. I expect there will be others like yourself in the same situation coming to have a closer look at Xymon now.

> We have fewer than 500 clients reporting into Big Brother. But 
> swapping them out for something else is going to painful and take 
> time. If a xymon server will happily accept bb-client messages, then I 
> could stand up a xymon server and replace clients through attrition.
>
> Has anyone else recently gone down this path?

Xymon is designed to be compatible with BB clients, so there is no need to replace the clients - you can swap out the BB server with a Xymon server, and your clients won't know the difference. This is quite intentional - I had 1000+ BB clients when Xymon was designed, and replacing all of them overnight was not possible.

As pointed out elsewhere, there are benefits to changing the client - especially for Unix-based clients. But you are free to do it whenever it fits into your overall maintenance, or when there is a specific need for a client replacement. (The actual replacement is fairly simple, since you do all of the configuration on the Xymon server. The client can be rolled out as a pre-packaged file that you just unpack somewhere with a standard config pointing it to your Xymon server - so you can use the same client package on all systems running the same operating system).


Regards,
Henrik

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