[Xymon] Advantages of Xymon vs Nagios?

[Berkley, Simeon]

I recently switched from an environment that was Xymon-monitored to a
smaller one that used Nagios at a different job. After giving their
existing Nagios installation a chance and attempting to get it to do
the things that Xymon does out-of-the-box (graphing mainly), I prefer
Xymon. I did enjoy the oo design of Nagios' config files, though I ran
into some weird precedence issues that weren't adequately explained by
the documentation I had, which included a decent Nagios book. I've
never needed a book for Xymon, the man pages that come with it are
sufficient and the community helpful.

Now I'm back at the previous job, using Xymon again. The only thing I
could say I miss about Nagios is the flexibility/extensibility of the
configuration, though that could get more than a little annoying to
debug. The two graphing solutions that I tried for Nagios never quite
worked, were hard to debug, and didn't seem to have an active user
community.

--
Simeon Berkley
Senior Systems Engineer
McClatchy Interactive


On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 9:23 AM, Ralph Mitchell <ralphmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Xymon mailing list
>>> 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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>
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