November 2015 - Xymon - Xymon mailman web

Xymon-4.22-rc3 Available
by cleaver＠terabithia.org 05 Nov '15

05 Nov '15

Hello all! Xymon-4.3.22-rc3 is now available on SourceForge:https://sourceforge.net/projects/xymon/files/Xymon/4.3.22/ The largest change *since rc1/2* is the addition of the 'ACCEPTONLY:' semantic to restrict a specific hosts.cfg entry to a defined set of tests (all other tests for that host will be silently discarded). Other changes: - display group names using HTML tags or special characters should now display properly - combostatus should handle bad config entries without segfaulting on non-glibc systems, like Solaris - multi-hostgraph RRDs for Connection Time should be fixed Please give it a test if you have a chance. I expect this will be the last RC before the 4.3.22 release unless major issues pop up. Regards, -jc

2 2

server-side message pre-processor?
by john.thurston＠alaska.gov 04 Nov '15

04 Nov '15

Is there a mechanism through which I can dump certain host+test combinations to /dev/null ? By way of example, let's hypothetically say I had a set of hosts whose owner steadfastly refused to clean up their data streams. They might be sending thousands of garbage test results to my server. The xymon server might be defined to not propagate the test results to the non-green screen, and there may be no alerts defined for the host+test combinations. But the xymon server is still passing thousands of garbage messages through its parsing, evaluating, graphing, and alerting handlers. Xymongen is still including these ignored messages in the list of "events received" at the bottom of the non-green page. It would be cool if there were a way to create a flush-list for which: This host+test message combination will always be flushed. It will never get past the parsing handler. It won't be recorded. It wont be reported. It will not pass "go". It will not collect $200. It will just disappear. Alternatively, the ability to prevent a host+test combination appearing on the "events received int the past x minutes" portion of the non-green page would be a big help. In the hypothetical situation outlined above, the thousands of messages from those hosts would push every other meaningful message off the bottom of that list of events. -- Do things because you should, not just because you can. John Thurston 907-465-8591 John.Thurston at alaska.gov Enterprise Technology Services Department of Administration State of Alaska

6 13

Xymon 4.3.22-beta Release Download
by cleaver＠terabithia.org 04 Nov '15

04 Nov '15

Hello all! Xymon-4.3.22-beta has been posted to Sourceforge, containing bug fixes and a smattering of new features and improvements since 4.3.21. It's reachable at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xymon/files/Xymon/4.3.22/xymon-4.3.22-beta.… Some notable changes are at https://sourceforge.net/projects/xymon/files/Xymon/4.3.22/, while the full Changelog is at https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/7707/tree/branches/4.x-master/Changes I know there are a few pending bug fixes already that I'd like to get in before the next release (multigraphs, if I can track down the source), however the number of features warrants some testing. Please let me know if you notice any issues (especially on non-Linux systems, as I don't have as much direct access to those). In particular, the changes in how xymonnet interprets 301/401/403 HTTP status codes could cause some confusion. Those who've customized their NTPDATE or TRACEROUTE command lines should check out the new Options variables. And finally, it would be helpful to have high volume environments (>60000 hosts) testing the "noflap" option for any notable performance impact. (It should be very slight.) If all goes okay, I'd like to release the final 4.3.22 some time next week. Regards, -jc

4 13

"Disable until change"
by john.thurston＠alaska.gov 04 Nov '15

04 Nov '15

We often use "disable until ok", but it was brought to my attention that it has burned us from time to time. For example: Host foo is yellow on disk. But that's ok. We're going to allocate some new storage for it in the next service window. The test is marked "disable until ok". But before the service window arrives, something chews up a whole bunch of disk and the now-red test continues to be blue because the test is not yet ok. We sometimes use "acknowledge" for this function, but the non-green screen can get kind of cluttered this way. Does anyone have a good way to fake "disable while status remains unchanged"? -- Do things because you should, not just because you can. John Thurston 907-465-8591 John.Thurston at alaska.gov Enterprise Technology Services Department of Administration State of Alaska

6 8

Anyone got a patch for the 24-hour limit on ACKS? Or a script to invoke acknowledge.sh?
by betsy.schwartz＠gmail.com 03 Nov '15

03 Nov '15

We've GOT to be able to ack alerts and have the ack survive the weekend. (if I can call acknowledge.sh from perl I have a script that can scrape the board and re-ack) thank you!!

5 8

useradm CGI -- Documentation?
by mvanderw＠nd.edu 02 Nov '15

02 Nov '15

Hello, I noticed that there seems to be a user administration (using htpasswd) functionality hidden away in Xymon. I found the useradm.sh script in /xymon-seccgi/ and there appears to be a CGI file for it too. All the other files to make the menu on the web page work are in the correct places too (just no entry for it in xymonmenu.cfg). However, I do not see any documentation on how to make this work or what needs to be set up for it to work. I don't even see any reference to it in any other man pages or other documentation! I managed to add the appropriate entry in my xymonmenu.cfg file to make it show up on the webpage, but it doesn't appear to be working correctly for me. Is this something that actually works? Or is this something that was only half-implemented (and won't work correctly in it's current form)? If it is supposed to work, can some documentation be created for it? Or can someone point me to some documentation for it? Seems like this goes right along with the chpasswd functionality that will be in the next release... Thanks! -- Matt Vander Werf

3 2

Status, NCV and time stamps
by mvanderw＠nd.edu 02 Nov '15

02 Nov '15

(Sending this again to the list, as I sent it using the wrong e-mail previously (non-subscriber e-mail)) I second this request for enhancement. It would be nice to be able to send more data from the client to be displayed on the column/test page, but not get parsed to be included in the RRD graph. Only parsing certain lines that are in the NCV format would be a nice feature. Something like what J.C. mentioned ("a data parser that looks for a hidden HTML comment marker for lines to process (and ignores the rest)") would work well for this, IMO. Or is there a way to do this already? (even through a hack?) Nothing urgent, just something that would be nice to be included in some future Xymon release. Thanks. -- Matt Vander Werf On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 10:39 AM, Matt Vander Werf <matt1299 at gmail.com> wrote: > I second this request for enhancement. It would be nice to be able to send > more data from the client to be displayed on the column/test page, but not > get parsed to be included in the RRD graph. Only parsing certain lines that > are in the NCV format would be a nice feature. Something like what J.C. > mentioned ("a data parser that looks for a hidden HTML comment marker for > lines to process (and ignores the rest)") would work well for this, IMO. > > Or is there a way to do this already? (even through a hack?) > > Nothing urgent, just something that would be nice to be included in some > future Xymon release. > > Thanks. > > -- > Matt Vander Werf > > On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:48 PM, Boldt, David <dboldt at usgs.gov> wrote: > >> Thanks for these leads. Will looks at both the filter and "trends" >> message options. >> >> As a request for enhancement, I think it would be useful to have an >> option to use a regexp to extract data from the status, one for each >> variable. >> >> >> >> On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:36 PM, J.C. Cleaver <cleaver at terabithia.org> >> wrote: >> >>> On Mon, October 5, 2015 3:52 pm, Boldt, David wrote: >>> > I'm in the process of converting Big Brother tests to XYMon and would >>> like >>> > to enable RRD/graphics for these tests. >>> > >>> > Several of these tests present date/time information which is >>> important. >>> > >>> > As a workaround for one test I have replaced the colon on a HH:MM:DD >>> > formatted date with a dot, but it doesn't really look like a time >>> anymore. >>> > >>> > * Is there a way to have NCV ignore colons (and only use "=")? >>> > >>> > * Is there a way to have NCV ignore a line (which might contain >>> colons)? >>> >>> >>> Unfortunately, there isn't a way to do either of these at the moment. I'd >>> considered a data parser that looks for a hidden HTML comment marker for >>> lines to process (and ignores the rest), but it's not quite present yet. >>> >>> >>> > >>> > * Can I use Data messages in such a way that the corresponding Status >>> > message is not parsed? >>> >>> The easiest way to do this would be to add a --filter= option to the >>> xymond_channel command line for the xymond_rrd process that's handling >>> the >>> *status* channel, but not the data channel. >>> >>> There's a CPU load hit for doing so (since now you're doing a PCRE on >>> each >>> message), however it may not have much of an impact depending on your >>> message volume. >>> >>> >>> > * Might there be some other mechanism entirely? >>> >>> Generally, speaking for more advanced RRD submission, the 'trends' >>> message >>> can be a useful data payload which is read directly by xymond_rrd. The >>> advantage there (aside from more direct control) is the ability to send >>> data points for multiple graphs at once, which could outweigh the expense >>> of another message transmission. >>> >>> >>> HTH, >>> >>> -jc >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> -- >> -- David Boldt >> <dboldt at usgs.gov> >> >> >> "Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I >> wasn't previously aware of." >> --Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001), Arthur Dent in "The Hitchhikers Guide >> to the Galaxy" >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Xymon mailing list >> Xymon at xymon.com >> http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon >> >> >

3 3

Xymon version 5
by jglouisjr＠gmail.com 02 Nov '15

02 Nov '15

Hi all, Maybe I'm out of the loop on this but is there going to be a version 5 of Xymon? Is there a roadmap page? Thanks, Jim -- *----------------------------------------[image: http://action.lung.org/site/TR/Climb?px=5751753&pg=personal&fr_id=12850&s_s…] <http://action.lung.org/site/TR/Climb?px=5751753&pg=personal&fr_id=12850&s_s…> Jim Louis \\\\||//// \ ~ ~ / | @ @ |* *--oOo---(_)---oOo--* "The software isn't finished until the last user is dead." ~ Anonymous

6 8