[Xymon] Configuring the debian xymon client

[Adam Thorn]

On 16/01/2019 22:44, John Thurston wrote:
> With my inability to make the client work in 'local-mode' (see my note 
> to the list of Jan 3), I'm trying to make it work in its default mode.
> 
> With apt-get, I've installed the xymon-client package on raspbian. I 
> have it running and reporting into my xymon server. The server is 
> displaying test results. My first difficulty is it is doing _way_ more 
> than I want it to.
> 
> I'm getting green for:
>   clientlog
>   cpu
>   disk
>   inode
>   memory
>   msgs
>   procs
> and clear for
>   files
>   ports
> 
> I don't want all that stuff! All I want is disk, memory, and _maybe_ 
> msgs. The other stuff has got to go. I don't want it pumped across the 
> network, and I don't even want it collected.
> 
> How do I trim this client's behavior down to size?

The way xymon works is that in the default "central" mode, a script runs 
periodically on the client which sends data to the "central" server 
where it's then parsed to generate the various test results. The message 
sent to the server contains the output of e.g.

/usr/lib/xymon/client/bin/xymonclient-linux.sh

or more generally whichever OS-specific script in that directory is 
executed by xymonclient.sh. So in terms of "pumping [data] across the 
network": your client sends whatever that script outputs. If you run 
xymonclient-linux.sh yourself you'll see that it's just an ini-style 
format, with named sections which eventually get parsed by the xymon 
server to produce the different test results.

You can suppress some (but not all) of those columns by specifying the 
NOCOLUMNS option in your hosts.cfg:

http://xymon.sourceforge.net/xymon/help/manpages/man5/hosts.cfg.5.html

so you could add something like

NOCOLUMNS:procs,ports

to a line in hosts.cfg. Note the comment that that'll only suppress 
future messages but not discard old ones, which'd lead to the tests 
turning purple - you may thus want to also send a droptest message to 
the server after changing hosts.cfg, e.g. by running

xymoncmd xymon localhost "drop foo.example.com procs"
xymoncmd xymon localhost "drop foo.example.com ports"

Adam