[Xymon] How Xymon invokes an SSH connection to the Client?

[Galen Johnson]

Even if you are planning to change to Tivoli you'll want to consider upgrading to a newer version of Xymon server since there were many security patches added since that release.  And if you really want to twist the knife a bit, I'm sure that Tivoli is not inexpensive...and that's just the software cost that doesn't include the people cost to transition any custom monitors to use their framework plus the learning curve required to familiarize yourselves with a whole new system.  But management will do, what management will do...and often defy logic.


=G=


________________________________
From: Xymon <xymon-bounces at xymon.com> on behalf of Adam Goryachev <mailinglists at websitemanagers.com.au>
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2016 6:46 PM
To: xymon at xymon.com
Subject: Re: [Xymon] How Xymon invokes an SSH connection to the Client?

Unless part of your problem is load related, and you are getting false alerts because the hobbit/xymon server is overloaded somehow.... (not entirely sure about this, but I guess it might happen that way)...

Though yes, why not just fix the monitoring system, and/or upgrade, rather than try to re-invent what has already been done...

Regards,
Adam

On 17/03/16 05:35, Agege wrote:
Well said Galen!
In addition, we're currently running Hobbit/Xymon 4.3.0.0 beta2.  And there's discussion going on about upgrading Xymon or build a new Server for Xymon or move newer Xymon hosts to Tivoli.

Thanks,
Agege

On Mar 16, 2016, at 8:27 AM, Galen Johnson <<mailto:Galen.Johnson at sas.com>Galen.Johnson at sas.com<mailto:Galen.Johnson at sas.com>> wrote:


This is just a curiousity on my part but why does upper management think that moving to Tivoli is going to change the number of alerts you get (reasoning inferred from the statement below)?  If you configure Tivoli with the same thresholds, you're going to get the same alerting.  If it's a volume issue, it seems like it would make more sense to reconsider the current monitoring thresholds.  Just sayin'.


=G=


________________________________
From: Xymon <<mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com>xymon-bounces at xymon.com<mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com>> on behalf of Agege Information Systems, Inc. <<mailto:cs at agege.com>cs at agege.com<mailto:cs at agege.com>>
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2016 11:15 PM
To: Jeremy Laidman
Cc: xymon at xymon.com<mailto:xymon at xymon.com>
Subject: Re: [Xymon] How Xymon invokes an SSH connection to the Client?

Thank you Jeremy!

Yes, the issues is that I have been asked to figure out is how Xymon handle monitoring activities with Xymon Clients.

And the reason being is that we have one Xymon server with over 3,000 Xymon clients on it.  And  we keep getting thousands of alert emails every day from Xymon clients.

Therefore, the Upper Management would like to move some servers to Tivoli and they want to understand what Xymon does, and how it actually communicate with Clients.   So that when we finally move some servers to Tivoli, we will not be missing anything that Xymon has been monitoring.

Thanks,
Agege
On Mar 15, 2016, at 6:08 PM, Jeremy Laidman <jlaidman at rebel-it.com.au<mailto:jlaidman at rebel-it.com.au>> wrote:

Please what script trigger the SSH tests that are built into the services that Xymon uses.

The SSH test, and all of the other network-probe tests (ping, http, etc) are performed by the xymonnet program.  This is launched by the xymonlaunch supervisor process, by default once every 5 minutes.  The execution parameters are defined in the tasks.cfg file, in the [xymonnet] section.

The way it works is this.  When xymonnet runs, it looks in protocols.cfg and builts up its suite of TCP tests from there, such as "smtp" and "ssh".  It also has built-in the three special non-TCP tests "ping", "dns" (or "dig") and "ntp".  Next, xymonnet scans the hosts file for any host with a tag matching any of these defined test names.  And then it runs through each test for each host having that test.

It's actually slightly more complicated than that, but it's functionally equivalent to how I've explained it.  For more of the details, refer to the man page for xymonnet, and read the "XYMONNET INTERNALS" section.

The "ssh" test is defined in protocols.cfg as follows:

[ssh|ssh1|ssh2]
   send "SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_4.1\r\n"
   expect "SSH"
   options banner
   port 22

This defines the port (which can be overridden per host in hosts.cfg) and whether the status page should show the response received after sending the "send" string.  The "send" string gets sent to the remote server being subjected to the test.  The "expect" string is matched against the response (banner) and if successful, the status goes green, otherwise red.  Or if the TCP socket fails to connect, the status goes red.

Is there a particular problem you're trying to solve?  If you would like some more relevant help, perhaps you could explain what you're trying to do, and what you are expecting to happen but is not.

Cheers
Jeremy




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Adam Goryachev Website Managers www.websitemanagers.com.au<http://www.websitemanagers.com.au>
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