[Xymon] Advantages of Xymon vs Nagios?

Mon Feb 9 16:44:44 CET 2015

I'' add that I've always preferred the 'cleanliness' of the xymon interface for large organizations. unless things have changed  drastically, I found Nagios cumbersome to navigate with more than a handful of hosts.

-----Original Message-----
From: Xymon [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Berkley, Simeon
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2015 9:21 AM
To: xymon at xymon.com
Subject: Re: [Xymon] Advantages of Xymon vs Nagios?

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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