November 2013 - Xymon - Xymon mailman web

WinPSClient - Updates?
by JasonRP＠techheads.com 15 Jan '14

15 Jan '14

So it looks like the WinPSClient hasn’t been updated in a few months. I had seen a thread from quite a while ago about some issues David was running into, but can’t tell if he’s still around and willing/able to work on it. I’ve been able to get XymonPSClient.exe (aka SrvAny) to run powershell natively as a 64-bit executable. The only change necessary to enable this was changing the PowerShell executable to running as %windir%\sysnative\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe. The sysnative portion prevents a 32-bit program (SrvAny) from being redirected to %windir%\SysWow64. (See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa384187(v=vs.85).a…) I also found a better service wrapper than SrvAny, namely nssm (http://nssm.cc/) This has the ability to detect if powershell fails and restart it, which is something SrvAny lacks. It also comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, so when using the latter the sysnative piece isn’t necessary. I’ve only been working at this for a day or two, so it probably needs more testing, but it looks promising. Is there any work (design contemplation) about how xymonclient.ps1 could handle external scripts? I assume this was just a future phase and not so much a limitation or barrier that hadn’t yet been overcome. Thanks. --- Jason Richards Pagh

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<something> in log file on web
by a_s_y＠sama.ru 24 Dec '13

24 Dec '13

Hello. Can I escape "<>" in log messages ? For example I setup to analize /var/log/maillog for "Over quota" message. Displayed string is: Oct 7 15:28:22 sendmail[4183]: r974LtLZ002344: to=, delay=07:06:27, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=cyrusv2, pri=2116609, relay=localhost, dsn=4.2.2, stat=Deferred: 452 4.2.2 Over quota E-Mail is missing but it should be in "to=<somemail at mydom.tld>,". -- Regards, Sergey

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FreeBSD Actual Memory Usage
by jlaidman＠rebel-it.com.au 05 Dec '13

05 Dec '13

Good Xymon Folks Xymon doesn't support reporting "actual" memory usage for FreeBSD systems - that is, available memory that may or may not be in use for buffers and cache. It only reports, graphs, and alerts on, swap and physical memory usage. Some OSes use some of the unused memory for filesystem caching and other purposes related to performance, and so the reported free memory count goes down over time even though the memory available to for use is not decreasing. On my systems, free memory is only a few percent. So this doesn't give any indication of the risk of memory "resource exhaustion". So what I really need is to report on "actual" memory usage. From what reading I've done, for FreeBSD this would be total memory subtract "free" + "inactive" memory, although that depends on who you ask. The "actual" memory reporting is not only a problem for FreeBSD, but for all supported OSes except for Linux, IRIX and Windows. I suspect many of these OSes report their free memory to include used-but-available memory also, and so the "real" available memory is a useful number. Even real memory usage reporting seems to have caused trouble in the past for FreeBSD, as Xymon has had to have its own client-side binary for getting the memory numbers, as is also the case for HPUX and the other *BSDs, NetBSD and OpenBSD. For all other OS types, standard OS tools (free, sar) are used to get memory usage numbers. Memory usage reporting in Xymon seems to be quite a mixed bag, in general. Some clients report usage to [memory], some to [freemem], some to [meminfo], some to [free]. The Irix client has no specific memory usage report at all. This is by no means a complaint - I'm sure Henrik would have been much happier if all OSes had a standard memory query interface, and I suspect a lot of these different reporting methods were for legacy support. So. I need to get actual memory reported for some FreeBSD systems, so I'm trying to work out the best way to do this. I'd like to fix it in a way that fits in with the "standard" model, but as I described above, there isn't really a "standard" model. Here are several ways I can think of to solve the problem: 1. FreeBSD reports [top] header output, if top is installed (as do many OSes). The server-side code could simply grab the numbers from there. This would work for other OSes that don't report "active" memory, and could be a common interface to memory usage metrics. Any new OS that doesn't have extensive client support could simply report a [top] section in client data, and Xymon would magically start reporting actual free memory. The down-side to this is that top isn't installed everywhere. Although on my systems it is, so that's OK. The other down-side is that it requires patches to the server code. 2. I could replace the "freebsd-meminfo" binary that comes with the Xymon client, so that the "free" figure has the "inactive" memory added (or whatever adjustments are appropriate). This doesn't solve the problem for any other OS. Perhaps that's OK - perhaps the problem is very much OS dependent because each OS has its own unique memory management. I think the binary can be replaced by a simple shell script that parses the "top" header or "sysctl vm.vmtotal" for the correct figures. (It seems that "top" gets all its numbers from sysctl anyway, so I'd do the latter, so as to avoid a dependency.) 3. I could report each of the different memory metrics separately to Xymon: active, inactive, wired, cache, buffers, free. Then I can graph them all, and look for various conditions on each of them separately, or in certain combinations that make sense. This is the most flexible option, and would provide the highest degree of insight to someone trying to troubleshoot a sluggish server, but it requires a lot more work on both client and server. It's also specific to *BSD systems. So, any other suggestions on the best way to achieve this? Which of the above is the best approach, do you think? The other issue I have is that nobody seems to agree on what's a useful measure to keep an eye on. The Xymon server-side code for Darwin reports used memory as the sum of active, inactive and wired. But other sources use the sum of active, wired, cache and buffers. Yet other sources say that buffers cannot be freed, and also that inactive pages are kind-of available if needed. My intention is to be able to predict when it's time to add RAM to avoid performance degradation, but it's not clear what numbers are going to give me that. Cheers Jeremy

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Set flapping by test
by germain1.malherbe＠orange.com 27 Nov '13

27 Nov '13

Hi All. Is it possible to set flapping's parameters (flap-count and flap-seconds) by test. Indeed, I would like to detect flapping on different intervals for some testname. Thanks in advance. Best Regards -- Germain Malherbe Orange - DSI France/Digital Factory/Hebex Bagnolet +33 1 58 96 62 51 / +33 6 87 66 99 43 germain1.malherbe at orange.com _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Ce message et ses pieces jointes peuvent contenir des informations confidentielles ou privilegiees et ne doivent donc pas etre diffuses, exploites ou copies sans autorisation. Si vous avez recu ce message par erreur, veuillez le signaler a l'expediteur et le detruire ainsi que les pieces jointes. Les messages electroniques etant susceptibles d'alteration, Orange decline toute responsabilite si ce message a ete altere, deforme ou falsifie. Merci. This message and its attachments may contain confidential or privileged information that may be protected by law; they should not be distributed, used or copied without authorisation. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender and delete this message and its attachments. As emails may be altered, Orange is not liable for messages that have been modified, changed or falsified. Thank you.

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recent icon duration
by kspringer＠innovateteam.com 27 Nov '13

27 Nov '13

Hi again. I'd like to modify the duration a 'recent' version of the icon displays. When a service changes states the icon changes. When it changes back to green the icon shows the 'green-recent.gif' icon instead of the 'green.gif' icon for 24 hours. I'd like to shorten that duration. Where do I change that? Thank you. ------------------------------------------------ *Kris Springer*

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Feature - Ability to Ack purple?
by betsy.schwartz＠gmail.com 26 Nov '13

26 Nov '13

Does anyone else think it would be useful to have the ability to ack purple? On the one hand, I understand that purples are outside the existing model of how acks work. On the other hand, operationally, without ACK there's no way to indicate that someone has taken ownership of a purple and is working it, other than signing it out. And we hate signing things out because that hides information.

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Disable SSL cert expiration test
by novosirj＠ca.rutgers.edu 26 Nov '13

26 Nov '13

Hi all, Is there a way to check an SSL service without caring if the cert is expired? I realize this may be an odd thing to want to do, but apparently in the application that it's being used the cert does not need to be current, just otherwise functioning to provide SSL (the real service is in front of a load balancer or something that doesn't care). Is there a way to make a cert expiration not cause the test to go red without playing with the source code? Thanks. -- ____ *Note: UMDNJ is now Rutgers-Biomedical and Health Sciences* || \\UTGERS |---------------------*O*--------------------- ||_// Biomedical | Ryan Novosielski - Sr. Systems Programmer || \\ and Health | novosirj at rutgers.edu - 973/972.0922 (2x0922) || \\ Sciences | OIT/EI-Academic Svcs. - ADMC 450, Newark `'

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Setting win svcs for monitoring using Display names
by juha.vuori＠pp2.inet.fi 26 Nov '13

26 Nov '13

Hello, As a happy user of Xymon for linux, z/VSE and z/VM monitoring since years, I now entered into the world of Windows. We have a win server with a big amount of auto-generated services, which should be centrally monitored by Xymon server. The problem is that the Display names of the services are human readable, like INV_ABC, but the Service names are generated and horrible, like D070AF2E-E343-40B9-9F23-45B8572309F4. I am running bbwin in centralized mode and Xymon server version 4.3.12, and I cannot find any other way to start to monitor these services than putting HOST=SRV123 SVC D070AF2E-E343-40B9-9F23-45B8572309F4 startup=automatic status=started in analysis.cfg instead of HOST=SRV123 SVC INV_ABC startup=automatic status=started which I would like to use. Is there a way (a setting in the bbwin client or xymon server) to use Display names instead of Service names when referring to the services in analysis.cfg? To clarify, the data the client sends now already includes the display name: [svcs] Name StartupType Status DisplayName D070AF2E-E343-40B9-9F23-45B8572309F4 automatic started INV_ABC ... BR, Juha Vuori

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Metrics reports on red/yellow duration? Unacked? Splunk?
by betsy.schwartz＠gmail.com 26 Nov '13

26 Nov '13

My grand-boss is looking to set some standards for how long we let reds and yellows go un-ACKed and un-resolved. There's a built in report but it seems to summarize total time red /yellow and what we're really interested in is how long it's taking us to respond. Has anyone done anything with this? I'm wondering if feeding the acklogs into splunk would let us work something up. And/or thinking about just trying to scrape this off the board. Thoughts and code snippets welcome

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use png's instead of gif's
by kspringer＠innovateteam.com 25 Nov '13

25 Nov '13

I create my own icons for xymon, but I'd like to use png files instead of gif's. What config file are those specified in? I can easily overwrite the old icons with my new icons if I leave everything as gif's, but I'd like to make them png's instead. Where do I set that? Thank you. ------------------------------------------------ *Kris Springer*

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