[Xymon] Advantages of Xymon vs Nagios?

[Sean MacGuire]

OK, I'll chime in since I know a little about Big Brother.

Let's divide it up into different areas.  I don't know much about 
Nagios, so someone else will have to chime in.


What problem are you trying to solve?

This may not be as straightforward as it appears.  Maybe the boss
wants to keep an eye on stuff as well.  Maybe politically new people
want a new thing, or a majority of people already know one or the
other system.  That stuff will really be key in what gets used.

Xymon / BB is great for publishing system information in a manner
that mere mortals and bosses can consume.  You can beat red/yellow/
green and purple(!) on a grid for a fast overview, or for putting up
on a big screen in a NOC.  So a quick test is give both screens to
your management and let them ponder it.

A downside of that is the Xymon / BB interface looks old.  I mean
'party like it's 1999 old'.  That's probably one of the biggest things
against it.  A new skin would help a great deal here since the 
underlying testing of stuff is pretty well the same.

How much custom stuff do you have in the environment already running,
and how long is it going to take to get it replicated in the new
environment?

Ditto notification systems, failover, etc.

Ultimately, how much do I trust each of these systems to tell me
when there's something wrong.  These things are going to wake me up
in the middle of the night... and people depend on the systems they
monitor.  So who do you want in the admin foxhole with you?  It takes
time to develop a level of proficiency and trust in a system...

The quick answer is 'let's spin one up and compare apples to apples'.
At the end of the exercise, it should be clearer what the costs will
be.

[And of course, if the answer is 'Nagios' you can leave Xymon/BB running
very quietly in the background to save your ass].


Nikolai Lifanov wrote:
> On 02/08/15 20:36, Andrew Rakowski 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
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> 
> For the sake of good investigation, I would ask the same question on
> Nagios MLs as well. You will find that people here tend to have positive
> things to say about Xymon.
> 
> - Nikolai Lifanov
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> Xymon at xymon.com
> http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon


-- 
Sean MacGuire                                 sean at maclawran.ca

Key West                                        +1 305 390 0888
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -  Alan Kay