Ubuntu Manpage: xymond - Master network daemon for a Xymon server

NAME

       xymond - Master network daemon for a Xymon server

SYNOPSIS

       xymond [options]

DESCRIPTION

       xymond  is the core daemon in the Xymon Monitor.  It is designed to handle monitoring of a
       large  number  of  hosts,  with  a  strong  focus  on  being  a  high-speed,  low-overhead
       implementation of a Big Brother compatible server.

       To achieve this, xymond stores all information about the state of the monitored systems in
       memory, instead of storing it in the host filesystem. A number of plug-ins can be  enabled
       to enhance the basic operation; e.g. a set of plugins are provided to implement persistent
       storage in a way that is compatible with the Big Brother daemon. However, even with  these
       plugins enabled, xymond still performs much faster than the standard bbd daemon.

       xymond is normally started and controlled by the xymonlaunch(8) tool, and the command used
       to invoke xymond should therefore be in the tasks.cfg file.

OPTIONS

--hosts=FILENAME
Specifies the path to the Xymon hosts.cfg file. This is used to check if incoming
status messages refer to known hosts; depending on the "--ghosts" option, messages
for unknown hosts may be dropped. If this option is omitted, the default path used
is set by the HOSTSCFG environment variable.

--checkpoint-file=FILENAME
With regular intervals, xymond will dump all of its internal state to this check-
point file. It is also dumped when xymond terminates, or when it receives a SIGUSR1
signal.

--checkpoint-interval=N
Specifies the interval (in seconds) between dumps to the check-point file. The
default is 900 seconds (15 minutes).

--restart=FILENAME
Specifies an existing file containing a previously generated xymond checkpoint.
When starting up, xymond will restore its internal state from the information in
this file. You can use the same filename for "--checkpoint-file" and "--restart".

--ghosts={allow|drop|log|match}
How to handle status messages from unknown hosts. The "allow" setting accepts all
status messages, regardless of whether the host is known in the hosts.cfg file or
not. "drop" silently ignores reports from unknown hosts. "log" works like drop, but
logs the event in the xymond output file. "match" will try to match the name of
the unknown host reporting with the known names by ignoring any domain-names - if a
match is found, then a temporary client alias is automatically generated. The
default is "log".

--no-purple
Prevent status messages from going purple when they are no longer valid. Unlike
the standard bbd daemon, purple-handling is done by xymond.

--listen=IP[:PORT]
Specifies the IP-address and port where xymond will listen for incoming
connections. By default, xymond listens on IP 0.0.0.0 (i.e. all IP- addresses
available on the host) and port 1984.

--daemon
xymond is normally started by xymonlaunch(8) it will then detach from the terminal
and continue running as a background task.

--timeout=N
Set the timeout used for incoming connections. If a status has not been received
more than N seconds after the connection was accepted, then the connection is
dropped and any status message is discarded. Default: 10 seconds.

--flap-count=N
Track the N latest status-changes for flap-detection. See the --flap-seconds option
also. To disable flap-checks, set N to zero. Default: 5

--flap-seconds=N
If a status changes more than flap-count times in N seconds or less, then it is
considered to be flapping. In that case, the status is locked at the most severe
level until the flapping stops. The history information is not updated after the
flapping is detected. NOTE: If this is set higher than the default value, you
should also use the --flap-count option to ensure that enough status-changes are
stored for flap detection to work. The flap-count setting should be at least
(N/300)-1, e.g. if you set flap-seconds to 3600 (1 hour), then flap-count should be
at least (3600/300)-1, i.e. 11. Default: 1800 seconds (30 minutes).

--delay-red=N
Sets the delay before a red/yellow status causes a change in the web page display.
Is usually controlled on a per-host basis via the delayred and delayyellow settings
in hosts.cfg(5) but these options allow you to set a default value for the delays.
The value N is in minutes. Default: 0 minutes (no delay). Note: Since most tests
only execute once every 5 minutes, it will usually not make sense to set N to
anything but a multiple of 5.

--env=FILENAME
Loads the content of FILENAME as environment settings before starting xymond. This
is mostly used when running as a stand-alone daemon; if xymond is started by
xymonlaunch, the environment settings are controlled by the xymonlaunch tasks.cfg
file.

--pidfile=FILENAME
xymond writes the process-ID it is running with to this file. This is for use in
automated startup scripts. The default file is $XYMONSERVERLOGS/xymond.pid.

--log=FILENAME
Redirect all output from xymond to FILENAME.

--store-clientlogs[=[!]COLUMN]
Determines which status columns can cause a client message to be broadcast to the
CLICHG channel. By default, no client messages are pushed to the CLICHG channel. If
this option is specified with no parameter list, all status columns that go into an
alert state will trigger the client data to be sent to the CLICHG channel. If a
parameter list is added to this option, only those status columns listed in the
list will cause the client data to be sent to the CLICHG channel. Several column
names can be listed, separated by commas. If all columns are given as
"!COLUMNNAME", then all status columns except those listed will cause the client
data to be sent.

--status-senders=IP[/MASK][,IP/MASK]
Controls which hosts may send "status", "combo", "config" and "query" commands to
xymond.

By default, any host can send status-updates. If this option is used, then status-
updates are accepted only if they are sent by one of the IP-addresses listed here,
or if they are sent from the IP-address of the host that the updates pertains to
(this is to allow Xymon clients to send in their own status updates, without having
to list all clients here). So typically you will need to list your servers running
network tests here.

The format of this option is a list of IP-addresses, optionally with a network mask
in the form of the number of bits. E.g. if you want to accept status-updates from
the host 172.16.10.2, you would use
--status-senders=172.16.10.2
whereas if you want to accept status updates from both 172.16.10.2 and from all of
the hosts on the 10.0.2.* network (a 24-bit IP network), you would use
--status-senders=172.16.10.2,10.0.2.0/24

--maint-senders=IP[/MASK][,IP/MASK]
Controls which hosts may send maintenance commands to xymond. Maintenance commands
are the "enable", "disable", "ack" and "notes" commands. Format of this option is
as for the --status-senders option. It is strongly recommended that you use this to
restrict access to these commands, so that monitoring of a host cannot be disabled
by a rogue user - e.g. to hide a system compromise from the monitoring system.

Note: If messages are sent through a proxy, the IP-address restrictions are of
little use, since the messages will appear to originate from the proxy server
address. It is therefore strongly recommended that you do NOT include the address
of a server running xymonproxy in the list of allowed addresses.

--www-senders=IP[/MASK][,IP/MASK]
Controls which hosts may send commands to retrieve the state of xymond. These are
the "xymondlog", "xymondboard" and "xymondxboard" commands, which are used by
xymongen(1) and combostatus(1) to retrieve the state of the Xymon system so they
can generate the Xymon webpages.

--admin-senders=IP[/MASK][,IP/MASK]
Controls which hosts may send administrative commands to xymond. These commands are
the "drop" and "rename" commands. Access to these should be restricted, since they
provide an un-authenticated means of completely disabling monitoring of a host, and
can be used to remove all traces of e.g. a system compromise from the Xymon
monitor.

--no-download
Disable the "download" and "config" commands which can be used by clients to pull
files from the Xymon server. The use of these may be seen as a security risk since
they allow file downloads.

--debug
Enable debugging output.

--dbghost=HOSTNAME
For troubleshooting problems with a specific host, it may be useful to track the
exact communications from a single host. This option causes xymond to dump all
traffic from a single host to the file "/tmp/xymond.dbg".

HOW ALERTS TRIGGER

       When a status arrives, xymond matches the old and new color  against  the  "alert"  colors
       (from  the  "ALERTCOLORS"  setting) and the "OK" colors (from the "OKCOLORS" setting). The
       old and new color falls into one of three categories:

       OK: The color is one of the "OK" colors (e.g. "green").

       ALERT: The color is one of the "alert" colors (e.g. "red").

       UNDECIDED: The color is neither an "alert" color nor an "OK" color (e.g. "yellow").

       If the new status shows an ALERT state, then a message to the  xymond_alert(8)  module  is
       triggered.  This may be a repeat of a previous alert, but xymond_alert(8) will handle that
       internally, and only send alert messages with the interval configured in alerts.cfg(5).

       If the status goes from a not-OK state (ALERT or UNDECIDED) to OK, and there is  a  record
       of having been in a ALERT state previously, then a recovery message is triggered.

       The use of the OK, ALERT and UNDECIDED states make it possible to avoid being flooded with
       alerts when a status flip-flops between e.g yellow and red, or green and yellow.

CHANNELS

A lot of functionality in the Xymon server is delegated to "worker modules" that are fed
various events from xymond via a "channel". Programs access a channel using IPC mechanisms
- specifically, shared memory and semaphores - or by using an instance of the
xymond_channel(8) intermediate program. xymond_channel enables access to a channel via a
simple file I/O interface.

A skeleton program for hooking into a xymond channel is provided as part of Xymon in the
xymond_sample(8) program.

The following channels are provided by xymond:

status This channel is fed the contents of all incoming "status" and "summary" messages.

stachg This channel is fed information about tests that change status, i.e. the color of
the status-log changes.

page This channel is fed information about tests where the color changes between an alert
color and a non-alert color. It also receives information about "ack" messages.

data This channel is fed information about all "data" messages.

notes This channel is fed information about all "notes" messages.

enadis This channel is fed information about hosts or tests that are being disabled or
enabled.

client This channel is fed the contents of the client messages sent by Xymon clients
installed on the monitored servers.

clichg This channel is fed the contents of a host client messages, whenever a status for
that host goes red, yellow or purple.

Information about the data stream passed on these channels is in the Xymon source-tree,
see the "xymond/new-daemon.txt" file.

SIGNALS

       SIGHUP Re-read the hosts.cfg configuration file.

       SIGUSR1
              Force an immediate dump of the checkpoint file.

BUGS

       Timeout  of  incoming  connections are not strictly enforced. The check for a timeout only
       triggers during the normal network handling loop, so  a  connection  that  should  timeout
       after N seconds may persist until some activity happens on another (unrelated) connection.

FILES

       If  ghost-handling  is  enabled  via  the "--ghosts" option, the hosts.cfg file is read to
       determine the names of all known hosts.