Customisation and Migration from BB->Xymon
Hi all,
We are currently looking at moving from BB to xymon.
I've been wanting to move us over to Xymon for ages and am excited by the fact I finally have enough management backing to undertake the shift!
I've read as much as I can find and the discussion in http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/System_Monitoring_with_Xymon/Other_Docs/FAQ#Q._... was quite helpful in many ways, but I still have some questions that I'd like to ask....
We currently have a Operations center that gets to watch a couple of different monitoring products, BB being one of them.
The BB implementation was historically customised in a couple of ways, some of which can be dropped but a couple below would be significant to Operations.
Is there a way of displaying all currently RED or PURPLE (no Yellow) alerts without playing with the source? * Currently, operations only perform an escalation on RED/PURPLE alerts, so it seems that a hack was done to the bbgen/pagegen.c code that created the bbnk pages such that for ALL hosts it only displayed hosts which had Red or Purple alerts on them. Can something like this be done natively with Xymon without needing to configure each host separately? This almost looks like something the Critical Editor/view should be able to provide?
Is there a simple way to still have "unregistered" hosts show up in the "bb2" page? *
The other one would be the fact that we often have new clients installed by the admins without the BB admin being informed expeditiously. With BB these would still show up in bb2.html. With the bbgen implementation, a method was found to provide a similar result, but it relies on the files in bbvar/logs to do it (which don't exist by default with Xymon).
Also any hints or tips about migration and/or migration approach would be great. Is there anything special about creating an "Active/Active" Xymon environment for redundancy?
Some background information about the environment in case it helps.
About 1,000 entries in bb-hosts about 50% are Windows/Unix boxes and 50% network
kit. One of the drivers for migration is an expectation of an additional 50-80%
increase in servers through more intergration.
Currently running BB 1.9c server (on AIX) with 1.9c clients on AIX, RHEL and a
small amount of Solaris. Windows clients currently run a BB client of 1.08d.
Using bbgen-3.6 to create the web pages.
Operations alert on Red and Purple's the Yellows are currently used by the local
support towers to do more pro-active fixes before Operations needs to escalate.
The idea is to move to Xymon on RHEL most likely starting on a VMWare guest
environment.
Regards J
Hi,
I'm sure that others will chime in with more detail... It's been years since I migrated from BB (and later from Tivoli hosts).
- Is there a way of displaying all currently RED or PURPLE (no Yellow) alerts without playing with the source? *
The 'all non green views' will show red, yellow, purple and blue (yes, I read the question:). Maybe ops can be trained to ignore yellow and blue? Outside of the display you can configure email/pager alerts that fit any need. Sadly, I've not given critical hosts much airtime.
- Is there a simple way to still have "unregistered" hosts show up in the "bb2" page? *
These show up in the 'Ghosts' report. As an admin it's a good idea to have a look at that tab once in a while. Sometimes hostnames don't match up exactly, and sometimes folks do as you describe and install / start the client software without informing the admin.
As for migration, if you can start with a new server and just setup your bb-hosts file from the old system, starting with 'conn' only you can slowly add client software to point to the new system. I found it easier and more explanatory to users/admins to divide the display-views-grouping/bb-hostsfiles based on some criteria (eg. Solaris vs Windows, location a vs location b, webserver vs mailserver, etc.) Splitting bb-hosts into inluded files worked well for me.
Most likely there is a simple way to setup client/server comms on some port other than 1984 -- keeping the current production bb running on 1984 until you are satisfied with the new Xymon implementation (for a group of hosts).
Good Luck.
Tim
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On 12/22/2010 11:41 AM, Tim McCloskey wrote:
Most likely there is a simple way to setup client/server comms on some port other than 1984 -- keeping the current production bb running on 1984 until you are satisfied with the new Xymon implementation (for a group of hosts).
There is indeed, and this is exactly what I did. I forget what file it is exactly, but it's definitely in the "etc" directory of the installs. You can grep for 1984 and easily locate that directive.
1999 seems to be a common alternate port for some reason.
- ---- _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ |Y#| | | |\/| | \ |\ | | |Ryan Novosielski - Sr. Systems Programmer |$&| |__| | | |__/ | \| _| |novosirj at umdnj.edu - 973/972.0922 (2-0922) \__/ Univ. of Med. and Dent.|IST/CST-Academic Svcs. - ADMC 450, Newark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
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Take a look at the bbgen man page and look at the --bb2colors option. Might help with the no yellow display.
-----Original Message----- From: Tim McCloskey [mailto:tm at freedom.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2010 11:42 AM To: xymon at xymon.com Subject: RE: [xymon] Customisation and Migration from BB->Xymon
Hi,
I'm sure that others will chime in with more detail... It's been years since I migrated from BB (and later from Tivoli hosts).
- Is there a way of displaying all currently RED or PURPLE (no Yellow) alerts without playing with the source? *
The 'all non green views' will show red, yellow, purple and blue (yes, I read the question:). Maybe ops can be trained to ignore yellow and blue? Outside of the display you can configure email/pager alerts that fit any need. Sadly, I've not given critical hosts much airtime.
- Is there a simple way to still have "unregistered" hosts show up in the "bb2" page? *
These show up in the 'Ghosts' report. As an admin it's a good idea to have a look at that tab once in a while. Sometimes hostnames don't match up exactly, and sometimes folks do as you describe and install / start the client software without informing the admin.
As for migration, if you can start with a new server and just setup your bb-hosts file from the old system, starting with 'conn' only you can slowly add client software to point to the new system. I found it easier and more explanatory to users/admins to divide the display-views-grouping/bb-hostsfiles based on some criteria (eg. Solaris vs Windows, location a vs location b, webserver vs mailserver, etc.) Splitting bb-hosts into inluded files worked well for me.
Most likely there is a simple way to setup client/server comms on some port other than 1984 -- keeping the current production bb running on 1984 until you are satisfied with the new Xymon implementation (for a group of hosts).
Good Luck.
Tim
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The 'all non green views' doesn't show blue, does it? At least not in default config.
/Johan
-----Original Message----- From: Tim McCloskey [mailto:tm at freedom.com] Sent: den 22 december 2010 17:42 To: xymon at xymon.com Subject: RE: [xymon] Customisation and Migration from BB->Xymon
Hi,
I'm sure that others will chime in with more detail... It's been years since I migrated from BB (and later from Tivoli hosts).
- Is there a way of displaying all currently RED or PURPLE (no Yellow) alerts without playing with the source? *
The 'all non green views' will show red, yellow, purple and blue (yes, I read the question:). Maybe ops can be trained to ignore yellow and blue? Outside of the display you can configure email/pager alerts that fit any need. Sadly, I've not given critical hosts much airtime.
- Is there a simple way to still have "unregistered" hosts show up in the "bb2" page? *
These show up in the 'Ghosts' report. As an admin it's a good idea to have a look at that tab once in a while. Sometimes hostnames don't match up exactly, and sometimes folks do as you describe and install / start the client software without informing the admin.
As for migration, if you can start with a new server and just setup your bb-hosts file from the old system, starting with 'conn' only you can slowly add client software to point to the new system. I found it easier and more explanatory to users/admins to divide the display-views-grouping/bb-hostsfiles based on some criteria (eg. Solaris vs Windows, location a vs location b, webserver vs mailserver, etc.) Splitting bb-hosts into inluded files worked well for me.
Most likely there is a simple way to setup client/server comms on some port other than 1984 -- keeping the current production bb running on 1984 until you are satisfied with the new Xymon implementation (for a group of hosts).
Good Luck.
Tim
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That is correct.
On 12/22/2010 12:14 PM, Johan Sjöberg wrote:
The 'all non green views' doesn't show blue, does it? At least not in default config.
/Johan
-----Original Message----- From: Tim McCloskey [mailto:tm at freedom.com] Sent: den 22 december 2010 17:42 To: xymon at xymon.com Subject: RE: [xymon] Customisation and Migration from BB->Xymon
Hi,
I'm sure that others will chime in with more detail... It's been years since I migrated from BB (and later from Tivoli hosts).
- Is there a way of displaying all currently RED or PURPLE (no Yellow) alerts without playing with the source? *
The 'all non green views' will show red, yellow, purple and blue (yes, I read the question:). Maybe ops can be trained to ignore yellow and blue? Outside of the display you can configure email/pager alerts that fit any need. Sadly, I've not given critical hosts much airtime.
- Is there a simple way to still have "unregistered" hosts show up in the "bb2" page? *
These show up in the 'Ghosts' report. As an admin it's a good idea to have a look at that tab once in a while. Sometimes hostnames don't match up exactly, and sometimes folks do as you describe and install / start the client software without informing the admin.
As for migration, if you can start with a new server and just setup your bb-hosts file from the old system, starting with 'conn' only you can slowly add client software to point to the new system. I found it easier and more explanatory to users/admins to divide the display-views-grouping/bb-hostsfiles based on some criteria (eg. Solaris vs Windows, location a vs location b, webserver vs mailserver, etc.) Splitting bb-hosts into inluded files worked well for me.
Most likely there is a simple way to setup client/server comms on some port other than 1984 -- keeping the current production bb running on 1984 until you are satisfied with the new Xymon implementation (for a group of hosts).
Good Luck.
Tim
To unsubscribe from the xymon list, send an e-mail to xymon-unsubscribe at xymon.com
- ---- _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ |Y#| | | |\/| | \ |\ | | |Ryan Novosielski - Sr. Systems Programmer |$&| |__| | | |__/ | \| _| |novosirj at umdnj.edu - 973/972.0922 (2-0922) \__/ Univ. of Med. and Dent.|IST/CST-Academic Svcs. - ADMC 450, Newark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
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On 12/22/10 11:14 AM, "Johan Sjöberg" <johan.sjoberg at deltamanagement.se> wrote:
The 'all non green views' doesn't show blue, does it? At least not in default config.
If a host has a non-green status other than blue, as well as a blue status in test foo, the row will appear because of the non-green status. If there is some other host with a non-green status for test foo other than blue, then the blue dot will appear in the foo column.
/Johan
-----Original Message----- From: Tim McCloskey [mailto:tm at freedom.com] Sent: den 22 december 2010 17:42 To: xymon at xymon.com Subject: RE: [xymon] Customisation and Migration from BB->Xymon
Hi,
I'm sure that others will chime in with more detail... It's been years since I migrated from BB (and later from Tivoli hosts).
- Is there a way of displaying all currently RED or PURPLE (no Yellow) alerts without playing with the source? *
The 'all non green views' will show red, yellow, purple and blue (yes, I read the question:). Maybe ops can be trained to ignore yellow and blue? Outside of the display you can configure email/pager alerts that fit any need. Sadly, I've not given critical hosts much airtime.
- Is there a simple way to still have "unregistered" hosts show up in the "bb2" page? *
These show up in the 'Ghosts' report. As an admin it's a good idea to have a look at that tab once in a while. Sometimes hostnames don't match up exactly, and sometimes folks do as you describe and install / start the client software without informing the admin.
As for migration, if you can start with a new server and just setup your bb-hosts file from the old system, starting with 'conn' only you can slowly add client software to point to the new system. I found it easier and more explanatory to users/admins to divide the display-views-grouping/bb-hostsfiles based on some criteria (eg. Solaris vs Windows, location a vs location b, webserver vs mailserver, etc.) Splitting bb-hosts into inluded files worked well for me.
Most likely there is a simple way to setup client/server comms on some port other than 1984 -- keeping the current production bb running on 1984 until you are satisfied with the new Xymon implementation (for a group of hosts).
Good Luck.
Tim
To unsubscribe from the xymon list, send an e-mail to xymon-unsubscribe at xymon.com
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On 12/22/2010 11:41 AM, Tim McCloskey wrote:
- Is there a simple way to still have "unregistered" hosts show up in the "bb2" page? *
These show up in the 'Ghosts' report. As an admin it's a good idea to have a look at that tab once in a while. Sometimes hostnames don't match up exactly, and sometimes folks do as you describe and install / start the client software without informing the admin.
Just happened to notice: additionally, there is a way to show the ghost client report in a text form (xymon-cgi/hobbit-ghosts.sh?SORT=name&MAXAGE=300&TEXT) -- this could almost certainly be used for alerts if someone had the interest. I don't have any ghost clients now so I can't see how it would look, but I bet its formatting is possible to use for a script.
- ---- _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ |Y#| | | |\/| | \ |\ | | |Ryan Novosielski - Sr. Systems Programmer |$&| |__| | | |__/ | \| _| |novosirj at umdnj.edu - 973/972.0922 (2-0922) \__/ Univ. of Med. and Dent.|IST/CST-Academic Svcs. - ADMC 450, Newark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
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In <4D12643B.5080501 at umdnj.edu> Ryan Novosielski <novosirj at umdnj.edu> writes:
- Is there a simple way to still have "unregistered" hosts show up in the "bb2" page? *
These show up in the 'Ghosts' report. As an admin it's a good idea to have a look at that tab once in a while. Sometimes hostnames don't match up exactly, and sometimes folks do as you describe and install / start the client software without informing the admin.
Just happened to notice: additionally, there is a way to show the ghost client report in a text form (xymon-cgi/hobbit-ghosts.sh?SORT=name&MAXAGE=300&TEXT) -- this could almost certainly be used for alerts if someone had the interest. I don't have any ghost clients now so I can't see how it would look, but I bet its formatting is possible to use for a script.
The text-format ghostlist happens to be formatted just like a bb-hosts file ... it wasn't entirely accidental, I can assure you.
Regards, Henrik
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On 12/22/2010 09:12 AM, John Marks wrote:
Hi all,
We are currently looking at moving from BB to xymon.
I've been wanting to move us over to Xymon for ages and am excited by the fact I finally have enough management backing to undertake the shift!
I've read as much as I can find and the discussion in http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/System_Monitoring_with_Xymon/Other_Docs/FAQ#Q._... was quite helpful in many ways, but I still have some questions that I'd like to ask....
We currently have a Operations center that gets to watch a couple of different monitoring products, BB being one of them. The BB implementation was historically customised in a couple of ways, some of which can be dropped but a couple below would be significant to Operations.
- Is there a way of displaying all currently RED or PURPLE (no Yellow) alerts without playing with the source? * Currently, operations only perform an escalation on RED/PURPLE alerts, so it seems that a hack was done to the bbgen/pagegen.c code that created the bbnk pages such that for ALL hosts it only displayed hosts which had Red or Purple alerts on them. Can something like this be done natively with Xymon without needing to configure each host separately? This almost looks like something the Critical Editor/view should be able to provide?
Perhaps I shouldn't comment on your operations, but I'm curious -- why would you want to do this? Yellow alerts warn of upcoming red alerts in many cases. I do not have yellow configured to page, just red and purple (and that's probably the default). What's wrong with that scenario?
- Is there a simple way to still have "unregistered" hosts show up in the "bb2" page? * The other one would be the fact that we often have new clients installed by the admins without the BB admin being informed expeditiously. With BB these would still show up in bb2.html. With the bbgen implementation, a method was found to provide a similar result, but it relies on the files in bbvar/logs to do it (which don't exist by default with Xymon).
Those clients will show up on the "Ghost Clients" list under reports on the top-level menu. I am fairly certain they do not show up on bb2.html. I can understand why that would be desirable to a certain extent, but I think that this way does a good job. It has the added bonus of helping you discover why you aren't seeing updates from a client that you think has been properly configured -- sometimes you will see its hostname does not match the hostname defined in Xymon. Actually, Solaris machines appear to do this 100% of the time as uname -n does not return FQDN, but my display server is configured to use all FQDN (mainly because BB recommended it).
Also any hints or tips about migration and/or migration approach would be great. Is there anything special about creating an "Active/Active" Xymon environment for redundancy?
Mainly the FQDN thing for clients. I don't know how AIX will do with this, but I've mentioned Solaris. I don't do Active/Active so I can't comment on that. Funny you should send this today -- I moved my BBDISPLAY/BBNET/BBPAGER machines from BB to Xymon about 6 months ago, and am just today going to remove the last wave of BB clients (replacing them with Xymon clients).
Another couple of gotchas, if you are migrating at all like I did:
- If BBPAGER is not the same as BBDISPLAY, I believe you will have to make a change. I was never able to figure out how to separate them, if indeed it is possible. This may not matter for you.
- If you leave BB clients in place and migrate from BB to Xymon slowly over time (which you can do), the centrally configured client settings (eg. disable monitoring of the /mnt FS, etc.) will be ignored for any client still running BB. I figured that the information coming in would be correctly processed by the server as that's where the config option is, but that's not what happened.
Anyhow, like I said, I went through this not all that long ago so if you have any questions, let me know.
About 1,000 entries in bb-hosts about 50% are Windows/Unix boxes and 50% network kit. One of the drivers for migration is an expectation of an additional 50-80% increase in servers through more intergration. Currently running BB 1.9c server (on AIX) with 1.9c clients on AIX, RHEL and a small amount of Solaris. Windows clients currently run a BB client of 1.08d.
I believe a real Xymon Windows client came out recently. I was going to try it in the near future (we don't currently monitor any Windows).
Using bbgen-3.6 to create the web pages.
Operations alert on Red and Purple's the Yellows are currently used by the local support towers to do more pro-active fixes before Operations needs to escalate.
Perhaps the easiest would be then to just route yellow alert pages differently, which I'm pretty sure is an easy task if I'm remembering my documentation correctly. I don't do this (as I said, I don't page on yellow at all), so I can't absolutely confirm.
- ---- _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ |Y#| | | |\/| | \ |\ | | |Ryan Novosielski - Sr. Systems Programmer |$&| |__| | | |__/ | \| _| |novosirj at umdnj.edu - 973/972.0922 (2-0922) \__/ Univ. of Med. and Dent.|IST/CST-Academic Svcs. - ADMC 450, Newark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
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participants (7)
-
dan.mcdonald＠austinenergy.com
-
Daniel.Nordquist＠orlandohealth.com
-
henrik＠hswn.dk
-
johan.sjoberg＠deltamanagement.se
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jw_mark＠ymail.com
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novosirj＠umdnj.edu
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tm＠freedom.com