June 2012 - Xymon - Xymon mailman web

holiday as planned downtime
by Jurgen.Claessens＠cegeka.be 11 Dec '12

11 Dec '12

Hey all, I'm running xymon 4.3.7 and I have been trying to find a way so that the holidays are being showed as what would be the same for the alerting. For me this would mean that if it's a holiday they would show as planned downtime and not show up in the allnongreen window. The alerting itself works without problems, but I cannot find a way for the planned downtime act the same way. Can anyone point me in the right direction? This e-mail and all files transmitted as attachment(s) thereto are confidential and solely intended for the individual to whom or the organization to which they are addressed. If you received this e-mail by mistake, please notify Cegeka's Service Desk at cegeka.support at cegeka.be or call +32 (0)11 240 363. We thank you in advance. Cegeka hereby confirms that this message has been swept by Sophos for the presence of viruses.

2 3

diskstat.sh/RRD oddity
by sholmes42＠mac.com 18 Oct '12

18 Oct '12

This is just a comment on an oddity with respect to diskstat.sh and RRD. We make pretty heavy use of the diskstat.sh script, which I believe I downloaded from xymonton. When I installed it I used the standard clientlaunch.cfg stanza for the configuration and everything worked great. I was called to task today because we have been having some disk io issues on the RHEL VMs and someone was looking at the trend graphs for some servers to see if there was anything they could learn and they noticed that beginning at about 4pm local time on Monday the graphs for the number of sectors written per second on a couple of file systems on several VMs jumped from the 10 to 20 range to the 300 to 340 range and stayed there. The graph for number of disk writes per second had a corresponding jump up to about 40 or 50 from close to zero. In analyzing the data I discovered that the file system that was displaying this behavior is the same file system to which the diskstat.sh script is writing its temp files. It appears that for some reason, starting at 4pm on Monday the 5 minute test interval and the 5 minute average for RRD got in sync and all it was seeing was the data point that corresponded to its own writing activity and RRD was using it for the entire 5 minute average (of course, that's what RRD does). I 'fixed' it by changing the test interval to something less than 5 minutes. I tried 2, 3, and 4 minutes and they all had the effect of reducing the data in the plot back to the expected level, i.e. to the level it was before 4pm on Monday. The mystery remains why it suddenly started seeing and using its own disk activity at the same time on several different servers. Steve Holmes ITaP/Purdue University -- If they give you ruled paper, write the other way. -Juan Ramon Jimenez, poet, Nobel Prize in literature (1881-1958) I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. -Frederick Douglass, Former slave, abolitionist, editor, and orator (1817-1895)

5 10

Event History
by kconnell＠ryerson.ca 04 Oct '12

04 Oct '12

I built a new Xymon server this week with v4.3.7 and all looks good. Can I copy event history from my current Xymon/Hobbit v4.2.2 server to the new ? I did try copying files/directories over from /xymon/data/<hist>&<histlogs>, but that didn't seem to work... Ken Connell Intermediate Network Engineer Computer & Communication Services Ryerson University 350 Victoria St RM AB50 Toronto, Ont M5B 2K3 416-979-5000 x6709

3 2

Duplicate email Recipients in Info page
by Don.Kuhlman＠schawk.com 14 Sep '12

14 Sep '12

Hi folks. Still working on cleaning up my xymon infrastructure. I believe I'm getting a better handle on things with my analysis.cfg and alerts.cfg settings now. I made some more changes to the analysis and alerts files to add other groups for emails. So now, I think I've duplicated a notify group in one or the other places. When I click on a certain host's info link on an application page, I'm seeing the same target recipient for things like conn, cpu, disk, memory, etc. What's the best way to troubleshoot my rules/settings to figure out where I'm setting the duplicated target recipients at? PS – I can send along the alerts and analysis files if that helps. Thanks much! Don K

2 4

Question on df processing for xymonclient-linux.sh
by Mark.Deiss＠acs-inc.com 04 Sep '12

04 Sep '12

In looking df processing in the Linux Xymon client module in client/xymonclient-linux.sh: echo "[df]" EXCLUDES=`cat /proc/filesystems | grep nodev | awk '{print $2}' | xargs echo | sed -e 's! ! -x !g'` df -Pl -x iso9660 -x $EXCLUDES | sed -e '/^[^ ][^ ]*$/{ N s/[ ]*\n[ ]*/ / }' A bit concerned that the df line can have a dangling "-x" option if the EXCLUDES variable is not populated. With a dangling "-x", the df command will abort with a syntax error and the df status will probably end up with a green status with no rrd history being populated. Users would not be aware unless they specifically brought up the green disk display or were reviewing disk trends and noticing the gap. The EXCLUDES variable can become null if the xymon client account loses read access to /proc/filesystems, for some reason the Linux flavor quit using the nodev tag (maybe started using NODEV or Nodev after a patch update....) or the xymon client went onto an (older) Linux version that did not use the /proc system. Suggest a revision either using sed or awk to build the EXCLUDES variable and a modification of the df command to eliminate the dangling "-x" option EXCLUDES=`cat /proc/filesystems 2>/dev/null | awk ' $1 ~ /nodev/ { printf("-x %s ", $2) }'` Or EXCLUDES=`cat /proc/filesystems 2>/dev/null | sed -ne ' /nodev/{ s/nodev[ ]*/ -x / H } ${ x s/\n//g p }'` df -Pl -x iso9660 $EXCLUDES 2>/dev/null | sed -e '/^[^ ][^ ]*$/{ N s/[ ]*\n[ ]*/ / }' If the parsing for nondev entries in /proc/filesystems now blows up for whatever reason (EXCLUDES is null), the df command will be capturing more than is desired which I believe would be preferred over missing the important file systems. Would like to use "2>&1" rather than "2>/dev/null" in the df line except any captured error lines may cause some downstream havoc with the rrd database processing.

4 5

Any alternatives to devmon?
by Paul.Root＠CenturyLink.com 09 Jul '12

09 Jul '12

Does anyone have an alternative to devmon? It's really old, doesn't seem to be being developed and the parsing of exemptions is flaky at best. Paul Root - Engineer III Managed Services Systems - CenturyLink This communication is the property of CenturyLink and may contain confidential or privileged information. Unauthorized use of this communication is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the communication and any attachments.

3 3

content test
by lebarber＠gmail.com 29 Jun '12

29 Jun '12

I'm trying to do a content check, but all I'm seeing under the "content" column is: No output received from server The http test associated with the content check is working correctly, the http headers are being returned. I can retrieve the page using wget from the same server that I'm running the content test on. I've tried changing the user-agent. I even set the user-agent to "Xymon" with wget and was able to retrieve the page. Anybody have any idea what is going one here? Thanks, Larry Barber

1 0

SSH test checks too often for a device
by jlaidman＠rebel-it.com.au 28 Jun '12

28 Jun '12

Hiya I have a few devices on which I do an ssh check. These devices have some sort of self-defence mechanism and they throttle connecting to the sshd process if they get failed connections (with no login) at too high a rate. Unfortunately, twice every 5 minutes (I have two Xymon servers) is sometimes a bit too often, and once they start to fail, I'm guessing that xymonnet-again.sh starts to hammer them every minute. The devices are appliances such that I cannot configure this behaviour. I know there's a funky NET:location hack that can be used to adjust the frequency of the net tests for nominated hosts, but I see no way to limit the effect to only the ssh test, and so all tests will be slowed down. Can anyone think of a better way to do this than the NET:location hack? I only want to slow down the ssh tests. Cheers Jeremy

2 3

iostat monitoring? script available?
by tsztur＠gmail.com 28 Jun '12

28 Jun '12

Does xymon have built in iostat monitoring? I can't seem to find any up to date information online on implementing iostat monitoring for clients. If I need to use a script, are there instructions on how to set this up for iostat specifically? tia!

1 0

hobbit/xymon clients
by sflanagan＠xand.com 28 Jun '12

28 Jun '12

I have both xymon and hobbit clients and I would like to upgrade the clients all to the same version of xymon. the ultimate goal is to upgrade to xymon from hobbit. Because I have a mix of clients I need to know what is running where. Is there a way that I can tell what hosts are running what version of client short of logging onto each host and looking? Perhaps a report? I know that there is a ghost client report. Is there a utility that I am missing that will give me this information? I have been searching and cannot find a way of doing this from the hobbit server itself. Thanks, Flan

3 3