[Xymon] Advantages of Xymon vs Nagios?

Mon Feb 9 15:23:36 CET 2015

About 5 years ago I started a new job at a company that had very little
monitoring set up.  I knew we'd need something, and I wanted that to be
Xymon, but Nagios would have been an easier choice because it was supplied
with the Linux distro we were using.  I got some stuff working, but then
there were mysterious failures - clients just stopped checking in with the
server for no good reason.  Every network test I tried from client to
server worked every time, but Nagios simply wouldn't connect.  I had to
cobble together some scripts to deliver reports.

Also, while I agree this may just be a misinterpretation, it felt to me as
if each Nagios installation wanted to be standalone.  Sure, it would
receive reports from other Nagios clients and make up pages to display, but
it seemed complicated to configure it to talk to anyone else.

Also also, graphing was a bolt-on extra.  I think I didn't have the correct
patchlevel for some prerequisites, so I had to manually upgrade $DEPENDENCY
and subsequently maintain that package forever.

Does Nagios have the equivalent of xymondboard?  I've written a number of
cgi scripts recently to query the reports from 1600 theoretically identical
machines and display the results as both a web page and a daily report
email.  This saves the app admins some time and gives upper management a
quick look at the state of the enterprise.

Ralph Mitchell

On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 8:08 AM, Vernon Everett <everett.vernon at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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>> Xymon at xymon.com
>> http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory"
> - General George Patton
>
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