[Xymon] How to run multiple xymonnet processes?

[Christoph Zechner]

Hi,

On 26/05/2021 02:55, Jeremy Laidman wrote:
 > Hi all
 >
 > We have a lot of net tests that take a lot of time, mostly DNS. 
There's not a lot we can do to reduce the time it takes to run these 
tests. The end result is that xymonnet takes in excess of 10 minutes to 
finish a polling cycle, causing missing data points in RRD files.
 >
 > Our Xymon server is not heavily loaded, so it could quite easily cope 
with running two copies of xymonnet. But I need a way to distribute the 
hosts between the two. Does anyone have suggestions about how to do this?
 >
 > It'd be neat if I could run xymonnet saying "only run tests for these 
hosts" on one instance, and "run tests for all except these hosts" on 
another. But this doesn't seem possible. The nearest to this seems to be 
the "NET:<netname>" tag, but I don't know how to use the combination of 
XYMONNETWORK and "--test-untagged" to do what I need. Also, I'm not sure 
that there won't be other side-effects to abusing the NET: tag in this way.

I also would use the NET: tag for this. In our network, we have lots of 
different network segments separated from each other and one machine, 
which runs xymon proxy that does the network checks for them.

Look in your tasks.cfg file, there's the default [xymonnet] task. You 
can easily define multiple checks just like it, for example:

[xymonnetabc]
    ENVFILE /usr/lib/xymon/server/etc/xymonserver.cfg
    #NEEDS xymond
    CMD XYMONNETWORK=abc xymonnet --report --ping --checkresponse 
--concurrency=4
    LOGFILE $XYMONSERVERLOGS/xymonnet.log
    INTERVAL 5m

[xymonnetdef]
    ENVFILE /usr/lib/xymon/server/etc/xymonserver.cfg
    #NEEDS xymond
    CMD XYMONNETWORK=def xymonnet --report --ping --checkresponse 
--concurrency=4
    LOGFILE $XYMONSERVERLOGS/xymonnet.log
    INTERVAL 5m

[xymonnetghi]
    ENVFILE /usr/lib/xymon/server/etc/xymonserver.cfg
    #NEEDS xymond
    CMD XYMONNETWORK=ghi xymonnet --report --ping --checkresponse 
--concurrency=4
    LOGFILE $XYMONSERVERLOGS/xymonnet.log
    INTERVAL 5m

This way, you can check three networks ("abc", "def", "ghi") separately. 
Note: "concurrency=4" is not strictly needed, we just use it to limit 
the number of concurrent connection to lighten the load on our xymon 
machine.

Don't forget to define [xymonnetagain] checks the same way if you need 
them for each segment/network.

In my opinion, this should work perfectly for your use case.

Cheers
Christoph


 >
 > Another idea I had was to construct two new hosts.cfg files from the 
original (and all included files) and tell two xymonnet instances to use 
these other hosts.cfg files (perhaps by overriding HOSTSCFG?).
 >
 > Any suggestions?
 >
 > Cheers
 > Jeremy
 >
 >
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