One more point I want to throw into this discussion is the security aspect. All our Xymon agents (also at the master server) are running under non priviledged accounts.
Even for (Unix) Xymon client rollout we don't need special rights (agent start is controlled by a user cronjob created during rollout, no entry in /etc/init.d or the like).
There are only very special tests which really needs extra permissions, and most of the time there is a workaround available to avoid this.
This minimizes the possible impact from monitoring to the system, and does not conflict with security concerns of admins and management, and saved a lot of discussions.
I don't know any other solution which is able to work like that.
Norbert
From: Galen Johnson <Galen.Johnson at sas.com> To: "xymon at xymon.com" <xymon at xymon.com> Date: 06/04/2014 03:22 PM Subject: Re: [Xymon] Why Xymon? Sent by: "Xymon" <xymon-bounces at xymon.com>
I'd ask "why not Xymon"? It obviously has a proven track record in your company. It can be a significant task to replace an existing monitoring solution with some thing new and integrate it into your processes. If they want to use offshore resources, why not let them help manage the existing system? I've used many different monitoring solutions and I always come back to Xymon. Once I show it's simplicity and ease of extensibility, others want to use it.
How easy will it be to add new monitors to the in-house application? Add new servers to monitor? What support level can you expect? Many of these you already have stated. There used to be a PPT out there about using Hobbit/Xymon. Not sure what happened to that or how current it is.
=G=
From: Xymon <xymon-bounces at xymon.com> on behalf of Gore, David W (David) <david.gore at verizon.com> Sent: Wednesday, June 4, 2014 8:20 AM To: xymon at xymon.com Subject: [Xymon] Why Xymon?
Hi All,
We are being asked “Why Xymon?”. We have some answers but I was hoping someone else may have been more eloquent and articulate than myself in defending the use of Xymon. Perhaps you could share your wisdom?
We started using Xymon when we lost our first level 24x7 monitoring group and have not looked back since. Now we are being asked to use an in-house application and offshore assets.
Some of the Xymon features we like are:
*big picture of all our apps via the nonongreen page, application, OS, network and databases monitored *graphing and historical trending *ease of use *light weight/low resource *multiple scripting languages support (any) *redundant (warm standby) *cost (free) thanks Henrik and everyone else *support via the mailing list,
We have been using Xymon from the beginning back in 2005. Before using Xymon/Hobbit we used Big Brother.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
~David W Gore
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