[Xymon] xymon as a drop-in bb replacement

[Henrik Størner]

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