Josh Luthman wrote:

I'm familiar with an educational organization that uses Big Brother (Quest) and has not been pleased with their support at all, to say the least.

Josh, that really sucks. If you pass along their details I'll see if I can help. Even though I'm no longer with Quest, I don't like that a user isn't happy with their support. Feel free to contact me offline - email is in the footer.

Of course, that was probably one of the biggest issues we had; that we never heard about stuff like this when it happened.

This list has provided excellent support for me using Xymon. Didn't even cost beer money, it was simply offered.

That's what lists are for :)

Sean MacGuire sean at maclawran.ca

Key West +1 305 390 0888 The best way to predict the future is to invent it. - Alan Kay

...

Would any of you mind telling me why you use xymon?

1. It's amazingly simple to use.
2. Something that irritates me about most monitoring systems, although I'm not familiar with zenoss, is that they don't keep trending data, Xymon does.
3. Client OS agnostic
4. What the heck is wrong with editing text files? Did that fall out of vogue when I wasn't looking? 4 1/2. All of its configuration is in text files instead of being buried in nine pages of GUI wizards
5. Highly customizable, as in external scripts and utilities are very, very easy to add
6. Excellent documentation
7. Very active community who are very willing to help (provided you read the man pages), and who come up with great external scripts.
8. clientless monitoring is possible (albeit limited, but you can still make sure your website is up!)

Jamison Maxwell Jamison at newasterisk.com

-----Original Message----- From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Josh Luthman Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 9:22 PM To: Sean MacGuire Cc: Xymon at xymon.com Subject: Re: [Xymon] why do you use xymon?

I'm familiar with an educational organization that uses Big Brother (Quest) and has not been pleased with their support at all, to say the least.

This list has provided excellent support for me using Xymon. Didn't even cost beer money, it was simply offered.

Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 8:58 PM, Sean MacGuire <sean at maclawran.ca> wrote:

Jones, Elizabeth wrote:

...

Would any of you mind telling me why you use xymon? I have a co-worker who is pushing hard for zenoss, and his arguments include "gui discovery tool", "no hand editing of config files", "it is an enterprise level monitoring system and you can buy support and bring in a consultant to set it up for you", and the ever popular "everyone is using zenoss now".

GUI discovery tool is nice. No Hand editing of config files is nice too.

If you're desperate to give people money, you can buy Big Brother from Quest (hey, it's Xymon compatible!)

Buying support and consulting? - If you need it, I'm sure even the original author of Big Brother could provide it... or any number of people on the list.

Ultimately, I've found the best way to handle these situations is to run the systems in parallel, monitoring the same things at the same time.  Choose N systems.

A winner will emerge quite clearly, and I'm sure if you need any help the list will prevail :)

Sean MacGuire                                 sean at maclawran.ca

Key West                                        +1 305 390 0888 The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -  Alan Kay

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Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon

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From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Sean MacGuire [sean at maclawran.ca] If you need it, I'm sure even the original author of Big Brother could provide it. Sean MacGuire

That's a pretty good reason right there! I'm not sure how many will pick up on that :)

Folks that depend on vendor support for tool xyz often find themselves at the mercy of said vendor when shtf. I can offer several reasons why I've used BB->Hobbit->XyMon for over the past ~15 years but it sounds like your co-worker has already made the decision to use some other product.

I think I'll make some popcorn and ponder this for some time.....

It works. It's cost effective. It's lightweight.

It fits my needs and environment.

If you need the average user (not able to edit text files) then you'll need to find a solution to that, Zenoss may be one option. The other would be to edit the bb-hosts (hosts.cfg) with the hobbitadmintools (which may have been renamed to xymonadmintools at this point). The question is what problem is the co-worker trying to solve?

Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 9:01 PM, Gore, David W (David) <david.gore at verizon.com> wrote:

1)      Because we are a support group and we have no money

2)      Easy to configure external scripts custom scripts to monitor our applications, networks and operating systems, Solaris, Linux, AIX, HP, OpenVMS (Old BB client)

3)      Light weight, runs on 2 old PCs, slimline desktop PC’s, that are a thousand years old but can run Xymon

4)      Because it’s opensource easy to use freeware that we can afford

If we needed to buy support or a consultant to install it.  It would not be the tool for us.  We want something free, fast, easy to install and quick to customize, in other words Xymon.

~David

From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Jones, Elizabeth Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 20:46 To: Xymon at xymon.com Subject: [Xymon] why do you use xymon?

Would any of you mind telling me why you use xymon? I have a co-worker who is pushing hard for zenoss, and his arguments include “gui discovery tool”, “no hand editing of config files”, “it is an enterprise level monitoring system and you can buy support and bring in a consultant to set it up for you”, and the ever popular “everyone is using zenoss now”.

---

Elizabeth Jones

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Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 11:01 PM, Vernon Everett <everett.vernon at gmail.com>wrote:

Hi Elizabeth

I use Xymon specifically because it doesn't have the features you listed. I am not confined by what the "discovery tool" thinks it has found, nor what it believes the config should be. Ask any power user on this list, and you will find we have done some crazy shit to "fool" xymon into monitoring things it was never really designed to monitor, using data from multiple places in ways that shouldn't make sense.

Crazy... Yeah... At EDS I had a script that would go to each of Travelocity's backend web servers, login as a user and go through the whole process of searching for a flight from Tulsa to Dallas. Another script went to a couple of load-balanced American Airlines web sites and verified that all of the servers were available *without* being able to touch each one individually. At one point I had about 3000 reports being generated by various scripts running from cron, at intervals ranging from 30 seconds to 24 hours, all on a single-cpu, 733MHz DL380 with 512Mb ram.

[snip]

And while we are on the subject of support, does Zenoss give you direct access to the developers? Hi Henrik. :-)

Say Hi to Sean MacGuire too, one of the authors of Xymon's ancestor - Big Brother!

Ralph Mitchell

The thing that makes the big difference to me is how easy it is to hook into Xymon. It makes it easier for your tool to match your business rather than having to force your business processes to match your tool. I've created several addons to Xymon to make it is easier to use in our environment. The ease you can access the Xymon's internal data (xymondboard) and tap into Xymon's data streams (xymond_channel) make writing such things fairly easy. A couple of rabble-rousers at my place of work were agitating for a move to Nagios a while back so I had to look at Nagios fairly closely, and it would have been a nightmare duplicating that functionality in Nagios. I suspect Xenoss would be even worse, any changes or additions you want would probably have to be done by Xenoss' developers, on their schedule (and budget).

Another think I really like about Xymon is its lack of polling, all the internal data is pushed from the clients, this makes it a much easier sell to security types.

Thanks, Larry Barber

On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Henrik Størner <henrik at hswn.dk> wrote:

On 13-06-2012 05:01, Vernon Everett wrote:

...

And while we are on the subject of support, does Zenoss give you direct access to the developers? Hi Henrik. :-)

Hi.

(Sorry, couldn't resist :-))

Regards, Henrik

______________________________**_________________ Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com http://lists.xymon.com/**mailman/listinfo/xymon<http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon>

Agentless? That's funny. That's OK for Windows, which seems to like sending everything and the kitchen sink out in SNMP, but have you tried monitoring Solaris with SNMP? Consider Sparc hardware, running LDOMs, with zones in the LDOMs. (Not an unusual mix - I have a number of clients doing this) I have yet to see an "auto-discovery" monitoring tool come even close to getting it right. Disks, most times, but for anything else beyond the "standard" stuff, forget it. I did witness one priceless example where one of these "auto-discovery" monitors announced, and started monitoring and graphing an MS-SQL database it discovered on a Solaris Sparc server. Sales guy left with his tail between his legs.

I set up Xymon a few years back at a local oil and gas company. A few hundred nodes, a healthy mix of Solaris, Linux and Windows, filers, mass storage, network devices, apps monitoring, database monitoring, the works. Besides the usual Xymon interfaces, I had also set up specific pages to provide application-centric views, allowing application custodians to monitor a single page giving them a complete view of the health of their application with associated dependencies listed on their page. Since I left, nearly three years ago now, they have tried (more for political reasons than technical) to replace Xymon three times. They still use Xymon :-)

I have yet to see agentless work properly.

Just my tuppence worth.

Regards Vernon

On 13 June 2012 11:03, Ralph Mitchell <ralphmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:

I took a quick look at the Zenoss community page, and fairly quickly noticed one interesting thing - apparently it's agentless. No agent to install on target systems, because it picks up information using SNMP. That's not necessarily bad, but some companies don't like it. Or you can use "zencommand" to run nagios binaries on your target. That info is dated May 2008, so maybe it grew up since?

Right now I'm running a somewhat modified xymon client out of cron on AIX, RHEL and SuSE systems, delivering reports over https on port 443 (which is open anyway) instead of opening port 1984. It doesn't use any compiled binaries other than the standard system commands, which means that I don't have to recompile for system updates. Bourne shell all the way... :-)

My situation may be unique, though - we have to comply with both PCI *and* DIACAP requirements.

Ralph Mitchell

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Jones, Elizabeth <Ejones at egov.com> wrote:

...

Would any of you mind telling me why you use xymon? I have a co-worker who is pushing hard for zenoss, and his arguments include “gui discovery tool”, “no hand editing of config files”, “it is an enterprise level monitoring system and you can buy support and bring in a consultant to set it up for you”, and the ever popular “everyone is using zenoss now”. ****

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Elizabeth Jones****

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Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon

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Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon

-- "While it is futile to try to eliminate risk, and questionable to try to minimize it, it is essential that the risks taken be the right risks. "

• Peter F. Drucker

I recently had to deploy a (commercial) monitoring system based on SNMP. It was quite fun since we had removed all traces of SNMPd years back from all client systems. None of the custom scripts that were deployed over the years for XyMon would fit that mold, resulting in a monitoring system that did not give the systems folks what they needed to do their jobs effectively. Fortunately, I left our XyMon servers and client binaries running in the background.

Having the ability to customize and tune your monitoring system is priceless. Those canned systems just don't allow that flexibility, and waking up to some annoying false/worthless alert at 0300 for a few days/weeks may help in the decision making process to choose an Open Source system.

From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Ralph Mitchell [ralphmitchell at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 8:03 PM To: Jones, Elizabeth Cc: Xymon at xymon.com Subject: Re: [Xymon] why do you use xymon?

I took a quick look at the Zenoss community page, and fairly quickly noticed one interesting thing - apparently it's agentless. No agent to install on target systems, because it picks up information using SNMP. That's not necessarily bad, but some companies don't like it. Or you can use "zencommand" to run nagios binaries on your target. That info is dated May 2008, so maybe it grew up since?

Right now I'm running a somewhat modified xymon client out of cron on AIX, RHEL and SuSE systems, delivering reports over https on port 443 (which is open anyway) instead of opening port 1984. It doesn't use any compiled binaries other than the standard system commands, which means that I don't have to recompile for system updates. Bourne shell all the way... :-)

My situation may be unique, though - we have to comply with both PCI *and* DIACAP requirements.

Ralph Mitchell

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Jones, Elizabeth <Ejones at egov.com<mailto:Ejones at egov.com>> wrote: Would any of you mind telling me why you use xymon? I have a co-worker who is pushing hard for zenoss, and his arguments include “gui discovery tool”, “no hand editing of config files”, “it is an enterprise level monitoring system and you can buy support and bring in a consultant to set it up for you”, and the ever popular “everyone is using zenoss now”.

Elizabeth Jones

Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com<mailto:Xymon at xymon.com> http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon