[Xymon] Advantages of Xymon vs Nagios?

[Vernon Everett]

For me, the choice was made about 10 years ago, when I was looking for a
monitoring tool.
I had seen Big Brother, but the license had just changed, and it was now
commercial.
Management weren't prepared to fork out a dime.
So I compared a few products, and the product now known as Xymon was the
only free open source product that did graphing out of the box. I wanted
graphing. PHBs love graphs. :-)
It was also far simpler than anything else to configure and get running.

And once I figured out how to write extension scripts, there was no looking
back.
We need to look to Da Vinci for inspiration here. He is reported to have
once said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication".
By that measure, Xymon is the most sophisticated monitoring tool out there.

I have used Nagios, What's-Up Gold, SCOM (hehehehe), Cacti, Zabbix, and
Solarwinds.
While some, can monitor certain things better than others, I believe that
for the Unix/Linux environment, there is nothing to compare to Xymon.
And, if we look at how it stands up in other areas (like Wintendo), it's
pretty impressive.

Try something.
Identify something arbitrary, that can be graphed, and monitored. Like
perhaps memory utilisation of a specific process, or highest process ID at
the moment.
It doesn't need to be meaningful, just doable.
Now see who can get it onto a monitoring screen, with graphing, first.

Be gracious when you win though. :-)

Regards
Vernon




On 9 February 2015 at 09:36, Andrew Rakowski <landrew at pnnl.gov> wrote:

> I've been using Big Brother since 1999, and Xymon for the last couple of
> years (on a different project at the lab), but recently, a team member has
> suggested that we switch infrastructure monitoring to Nagios, which he's
> been using on other systems he manages elsewhere in the lab.
>
> He's using something called OMD (the Open Monitoring Distribution - from
> http://omdistro.org/ ), which is supposed to improve on the complexity of
> using Nagios.  Our management would like us to do a comparison to see if we
> should switch from our old Big Brother monitoring (which is still running
> well) to a more up to date Xymon or convert instead to OMD/Nagios.
>
> Looking for information on Xymon and Nagios comparisons, I found this
> comment from Henrik in the Xymon mailing list archive:
>
>     http://lists.xymon.com/archive/2006-June/007530.html
>
> that mentions the ease of setup and use of Xymon as compared to Nagios,
> but that comment is nine years old.
>
> Daniel's recent comments on this list about wanting to move from Nagios to
> Xymon:
>
> On Fri, 6 Feb 2015, LOZOVSKY, DANIEL L wrote (in part):
>
>> Subject: Re: [Xymon] Installing xymon/apache as a non-root user
>>
>>  [...snip...]
>
>> community.  I have been pushing AT&T to utilize xymon instead of nagios.
>> I have been using BB open source version for almost 10 years and it really
>> saved us at Supply Chain.  Of course, I had to make a lot of modifications
>> to it.  Xymon is the next logical step to help make things much better.
>>
> [...snip...]
>
> has me wondering what I can point to as good reasons to use Xymon vs
> Nagios, as certainly, people do want to switch.
>
> So, what are reasons that folks like Xymon better than Nagios (besides all
> the helpful info from the great group of folks I've been reading during my
> years of lurking on the list...)?
>
> Best regards,
>
> -Andrew
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>



-- 
"Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory"
- General George Patton
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