[Xymon] Hand editing config files

[Henrik Størner]

Hi,

in another mail thread, another monitoring tool (Zenoss) was mentioned 
which had the advantage of “no hand editing of config files”.

Text based config files have their ups and downs - they are infinitely 
flexible and can adapt to all sorts of weird ways of defining your 
setup, but it is also easier to "get it wrong" and put something in 
there which doesn't work. Even happens to me occasionally.

It's the age-old debate over whether something is "powerful" or "dangerous".

I am currently working on the next Xymon version (except I've been 
swamped with for-pay work the past couple of months ... and a hefty 
round of lay-offs in other departments than mine). This involves a 
complete rewrite of the network testing tool, and for this rewrite I've 
started using an SQLite database for storing some intermediate data used 
by the network tester, instead of keeping it in a bunch of temporary 
text-files.

And it has made me consider the idea of using a database for storing at 
least some of the configuration - first of all the hosts.cfg 
configuration of hosts, IP-adresses and network tests. This would make 
some things simpler, others a bit more complex - "xymongrep", for 
instance - but would also make it a lot easier to provide a GUI for 
managing what hosts are being monitored.

This is not going to happen anytime soon, but since the subject was up 
in the air - what do you think about it ? Is it a major problem that 
Xymon has all configuration in text files ? How many of you 
auto-generate the Xymon config by extracting the information from a 
database already ?

Just looking for some feedback...


Regards,
Henrik