System Monitoring with Xymon/User Guide

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[edit] System Monitoring Overview

[edit] What is system monitoring ?

Computer monitoring systems are used to repeatedly gather data from various monitored systems for the purpose of real-time incident notification, system health verification, performance analysis, and longitudinal capacity planning. Various metrics are typically gathered by these systems, including CPU, memory, network, or disk utilization, response time of network services, occurrence of anomalous messages in system log, et al. Without such a tool, like big brother or Xymon, a system administrator would have to login to each machines to collect these information repeatedly. This kind of repetitive task can be automated using a system monitoring tool.

[edit] About System Monitoring

See About System Monitoring for a more details overview of monitoring systems.

[edit] Generic System Monitoring Features

See Generic Monitoring System Features

[edit] Some commercial system monitoring tools

[edit] Some open-source system monitoring tools

[edit] Why use Xymon ?

1. The source code is open and in GPL license.
2. There is no seat license fee.
3. Hobbit Server is highly compatible with Big Brother client.
4. It has a user and developer community.

[edit] How Xymon was designed ?

Please see Design Overview

[edit] Who uses Xymon ?

Please see the user list.

[edit] Xymon System Monitoring Tool Wish lists

• Delete a host from web page UI.
• GUI administration tool.
• Prepackaged binary for different OS with lots of add-on modules.
• E-mail or SMS notification --allready exists, you can also trigger shell scripts on events
• Easily customizable.
• Has commercial support.
• Remote wake/die capabilities

[edit] Open Source System Monitoring Software Comparison

[edit] General comparison

There many others system monitoring tools, please add them here if you got some free time. TBC. Pardon the wrong content below, I (TJ Yang) found following great template from other wikibook. Effort is needed to plug in system monitoring stuff.

1. ↑ Although Bazaar is a distributed version control system it can also be used in a centralized manner using lock step development and checkouts.

• Repository model describes the relationship between various copies of the source code repository. In a client-server model, users access a master repository via a client; typically, their local machines hold only a working copy of a project tree. Changes in one working copy must be committed to the master repository before they are propagated to other users. In a distributed model, repositories act as peers, and users typically have a local repository with version history available, in addition to their working copies.
• Concurrency model describes how changes to the working copy are managed to prevent simultaneous edits from causing nonsensical data in the repository. In a lock model, changes are disallowed until the user requests and receives an exclusive lock on the file from the master repository. In a merge model, users may freely edit files, but are informed of possible conflicts upon checking their changes into the repository, whereupon the version control system may merge changes on both sides, or let the user decide when conflicts arise. Note that distributed version control almost always implies a merge concurrency model.

[edit] Hobbit vs BB BTF

This is a detail comparison chart why a current BB site want to migrate to Hobbit. Opinions could be biased toward Hobbit.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bbwin

[edit] References

• http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit/help/about.html

[edit] Hobbit System Monitoring at home

• To monitor your computers at home,perhaps integration with X10 stuff.
• This section is about Hobbit and your home system monitoring.
• porting hobbit to linksys's nlsu2 or wrt54g.

[edit] Hobbit Support

[edit] Commercial Support

• TWW offer Hobbit email support. The Server and clients are prepackaged for TWW supported OS via commercial subscription service. server and client package source are also available for download per GNU license. You can create your own package from the package source if you know TWW HPM system.
• VM Assist, Inc., http://www.vmassist.com.
• McNatton Technologies, LLC, http://www.mcnatton.com/monitor.php
• Reverse Polarity, LLC - We offer full support for Xymon, including on-site server installation, client configurations and custom scripting where required. Call us and see how we can help!
• Cook IT Services: http://cookitservices.com/index.html (Site seems to be offline 02/19/09 - waa)

[edit] Free Community Support

Your questions will not necessary got answered.

• Maillist Archive: http://www.hswn.dk/hobbiton/
• Project page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/hobbitmon/

[edit] Hobbit Demo Site

Here are a few best hobbit implementation sites.

• Official Hobbit Site
• A home hobbit instance running on i386 Solaris 10 vmware appliance Unresponsive as of 18-MAY-2009

 Sat Apr 21 06:25:43 CDT 2007 up: 07:35, 1 users, 70 procs, load=0.01

System clock is 0 seconds off


   PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP       
   407 root     1724K  976K sleep   59    0   0:01:16 0.1% vmware-guestd/1
   542 root       10M   11M sleep   59    0   0:00:55 0.1% Xorg/1
  8112 hobbitc  4440K 3948K cpu1     0    0   0:00:00 0.1% prstat/1
  8081 hobbitc  1052K  796K sleep    0    0   0:00:00 0.1% hobbitclient-su/1
   640 root     9572K 6868K sleep   59    0   0:00:18 0.0% dtgreet/1
  8077 hobbitc  1048K  796K sleep   51    0   0:00:00 0.0% hobbitclient.sh/1
     1 root     2004K 1080K sleep   59    0   0:00:01 0.0% init/1
   474 root     8248K 2868K sleep   59    0   0:00:05 0.0% httpd.prefork/1
    96 root     3424K 2324K sleep   59    0   0:00:03 0.0% nscd/24
  1148 hobbitc  1056K  756K sleep   59    0   0:00:01 0.0% hobbitlaunch/1
   459 hobbits  1080K  720K sleep   59    0   0:00:02 0.0% hobbitlaunch/1
   461 hobbits  4844K 1540K sleep   59    0   0:00:04 0.0% hobbitd/1
   256 root     1060K  632K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% utmpd/1
   234 daemon   2336K 1540K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% statd/1
    93 root     2132K 1268K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% syseventd/15
   159 root     2480K 1560K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% picld/4
   250 root     1884K 1092K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% ttymon/1
   195 root     2236K  884K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% cron/1
   373 root     2488K 1924K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% vold/6
   222 daemon   2412K 1140K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% rpcbind/1
 NPROC USERNAME  SIZE   RSS MEMORY      TIME  CPU                             
    36 root      134M   86M    15%   0:02:56 0.3%
     4 hobbitc  7596K 6296K   1.1%   0:00:01 0.2%
    23 hobbits   104M   42M   7.5%   0:00:12 0.0%
     4 daemon     10M 5996K   1.0%   0:00:00 0.0%
Total: 67 processes, 182 lwps, load averages: 0.01, 0.01, 0.0

[edit] Hobbit System Monitoring Foundation

• http://sourceforge.net/project/project_donations.php?group_id=128058

[edit] List of Donors

URL for donation to this project is at http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit/, look for PayPal icon.

[edit] 2006

• T.J. Yang

[edit] 2007

[edit] Hobbit Logo

• No hurry but we need a good logo. Put your design here for voting later on.
• The icon should/better be associated with Henrik's idea of Hobbit love green.
• We may consider using GNUStep's approach to contract out the logo design.

[edit] Renaming Hobbit

I've(Henrik Storner) been going over the various suggestions this past week, and I've
setup a few loose criteria for judging the names. In no particular
order:

*) No references to Tolkien characters. Although I might be able to
   get away with "hobbitmon" or Gandalfr (thanks, Anna - didn't know 
   those names came from the Edda), I do not want to push my luck
   any further.
*) Likewise, no names that might infringe on existing characters from
   movies, books etc. 
*) Nothing that is trademark'ed.
*) The name should be somewhat meaningful. Not necessarily obvious,
   but enough that it is understandable. Also, somewhat "business-
   like". (Sorry Vernon - I enjoyed Your ventures into Mesopotamian
   astronomy and egyptology, since those are also hobby-interests
   of mine, but very few would know who "Horus" is, or what was
   the role of Aldebaran).
*) The name should be short. Preferably two or three syllables, and
   fit into the space currently on the webpages where it says "Hobbit"
   now. This is because the name is frequently used in speech; I often
   have people at work asking me "what's on Hobbit right now?" if they
   need to know what issues there are currently. It just wouldn't feel
   right if that was "what's on smart-and-open-systems-monitor right
   now" ...
*) .com, .net and .org should preferably be available.

Please put down your suggested new name for hobbit. also Under "Sponsors", please vote with your name behind the original sponsor. so we can do the tally in "Total Supporters" field.

[edit] Hobbit Renamed to Xymon

Greetings!

As I wrote some time ago, I was contacted by the owners of the 
"Hobbit" trademark back in June.

Several names have been suggested by you on the mailing list
(see http://www.hswn.dk/hobbiton/2008/08/msg00193.html), but
the decision has now been made.

As of today, the official name is "Xymon" (pronounced just
like "Simon").

At the moment this renaming has not caused much of a change,
but it will be implemented over the coming weeks.

* The Sourceforge project URL remains at 
  https://sf.net/projects/hobbitmon/ due to project renamings
  currently being suspended on Sourceforge. Once the suspension
  is lifted, however, there is a queued request to rename the
  project. It will then be available at
  https://sf.net/projects/xymon/

* The mailing list address remains "hobbit@hswn.dk" for the
  moment. A new "Xymon" mailing list will be setup, but 
  this will be announced separately.

* The demo website http://www.xymon.com/ is active. The old
  address - www.hobbitmon.com - will remain in place for
  some time, but no longer than August 2009.

* Changes to documentation, code, webpages inside the
  Hobbit monitor etc. will be happening over the next couple
  of weeks, and will be fully implemented in the upcoming
  release.


Best regards,
Henrik