Provided by: xymon-client_4.3.25-1_amd64 bug

NAME

       Xymon - Introduction to Xymon

OVERVIEW

       Xymon  is  a tool for monitoring the health of your networked servers and the applications
       running on them.  It provides a simple, intuitive way  of  checking  the  health  of  your
       systems  from  a  web  browser,  and can also alert you to any problems that arise through
       alarms sent as e-mail, SMS messages, via a pager or by other means.

       Xymon is Open Source software, licensed under the GNU GPL.  This means that you  are  free
       to  use  Xymon  as much as you like, and you are free to re-distribute it and change it to
       suit your specific needs. However, if you change  it  then  you  must  make  your  changes
       available  to  others  on  the same terms that you received Xymon originally. See the file
       COPYING in the Xymon source-archive for details.

       Xymon was called "Hobbit" until November 2008, when it was renamed to Xymon. This was done
       because the name "Hobbit" is trademarked.

       Xymon  initially began life as an enhancement to Big Brother called "bbgen". Over a period
       of 5 years, Xymon has evolved from a small add-on to a full-fledged monitoring system with
       capabilities  far exceeding what was in the original Big Brother package. Xymon does still
       maintain some compatibility with Big Brother, so  it  is  possible  to  migrate  from  Big
       Brother to Xymon without too much trouble.

       Migrating  to  Xymon  will  give you a significant performance boost, and provide you with
       much more advanced monitoring.  The Xymon tools are designed for installations  that  need
       to  monitor  a  large number of hosts, with very little overhead on the monitoring server.
       Monitoring of thousands of hosts with a single Xymon server is possible - it was developed
       to handle just this task.

FEATURES

       These are some of the core features in Xymon:

       Monitoring of hosts and networks
              Xymon  collects  information  about your systems in two ways: From querying network
              services (Web, LDAP, DNS, Mail etc.), or from scripts that run either on the  Xymon
              server  or  on  the  systems you monitor. The Xymon package includes a Xymon client
              which you can install on the servers you monitor; it collects data about  the  CPU-
              load,  disk-  and  memory-utilization,  log  files, network ports in use, file- and
              directory-information and more.  All of the information is stored inside Xymon, and
              you  can  define  conditions that result in alerts, e.g. if a network service stops
              responding, or a disk fills up.

       Centralized configuration
              All configuration of Xymon is done  on  the  Xymon  server.  Even  when  monitoring
              hundreds  or  thousands  of hosts, you can control their configuration centrally on
              the Xymon server - so there is no need for you to login to a system just to  change
              e.g. which processes are monitored.

       Works on all major platforms
              The Xymon server works on all Unix-like systems, including Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD,
              AIX, HP-UX and others. The Xymon client supports  all  major  Unix  platforms,  and
              there     are     other    Open    Source    projects    -    e.g.    BBWin,    see
              http://bbwin.sourceforge.net/ -  providing  support  for  Microsoft  Windows  based
              systems.

       A simple, intuitive web-based front-end
              "Green  is  good,  red is bad". Using the Xymon web pages is as simple as that. The
              hosts you monitor can be grouped together  in  a  way  that  makes  sense  in  your
              organisation  and presented in a tree-structure.  The web pages use many techniques
              to convey information about the monitored systems, e.g. different icons can be used
              for  recently  changed  statuses;  links  to  sub-pages  can  be listed in multiple
              columns; different icons can be used for dial-up-tests or  reverse-tests;  selected
              columns  can  be  dropped or unconditionally included on the web pages to eliminate
              unwanted information, or always include certain  information;  user-friendly  names
              can  be  shown  for  hosts  regardless  of  their  true hostname. You can also have
              automatic links to  on-line  documentation,  so  information  about  your  critical
              systems is just a click away.

       Integrated trend analysis, historical data and SLA reporting
              Xymon  stores  trend- and availability-information about everything it monitors. So
              if you need to look at how your systems behave over time,  Xymon  has  all  of  the
              information  you  need:  Whether it is response times of your web pages during peak
              hours, the CPU utilization over the past 4 weeks, or what  the  availability  of  a
              site  was  compared  to the SLA - it's all there inside Xymon. All measurements are
              tracked and made available in time-based graphs.

              When you need to drill down into  events  that  have  occurred,  Xymon  provides  a
              powerful  tool for viewing the event history for each status log, with overviews of
              when problems have occurred during the past and easy-to-use zoom-in on the event.

              For SLA reporting, You can configure planned downtime, agreed service  availability
              level,  service  availability  time  and  have  Xymon generate availability reports
              directly showing the actual availability measured  against  the  agreed  SLA.  Such
              reports  of service availability can be generated on-the-fly, or pre-generated e.g.
              for monthly reporting.

       Role-based views
              You can have multiple different views of the same hosts for different parts of  the
              organisation,  e.g.  one  view  for  the  hardware  group, and another view for the
              webmasters - all of them fed by the same test tools.

              If you have a dedicated Network Operations  Center,  you  can  configure  precisely
              which  alerts  will  appear on their monitors - e.g. a simple anomaly in the system
              log file need not trigger a call to 3rd-level support at 2 AM, but if  the  on-line
              shop  goes  down  you  do want someone to respond immediately.  So you put the web-
              check for the on-line shop on the NOC monitor page,  and  leave  out  the  log-file
              check.

       Also for the techies
              The  Xymon  user-interface is simple, but engineers will also find lots of relevant
              information. E.g. the data that clients report to Xymon contain the raw output from
              a  number  of system commands.  That information is available directly in Xymon, so
              an administrator no longer needs to login to a server to get an overview of how  it
              is  behaving  -  the  very  commands  they  would  normally  run  have already been
              performed, and the results are on-line in Xymon.

       Easy to adapt to your needs
              Xymon includes a lot of tests in  the  core  package,  but  there  will  always  be
              something  specific to your setup that you would like to watch. Xymon allows you to
              write test scripts in your favorite scripting language and have the results show up
              as  regular  status  columns  in Xymon. You can trigger alerts from these, and even
              track trends in graphs just by a simple configuration setting.

       Real network service tests
              The network test tool knows how to test most  commonly  used  protocols,  including
              HTTP,  SMTP  (e-mail), DNS, LDAP (directory services), and many more. When checking
              websites, it is possible to not only check that the web server is  responding,  but
              also that the response looks correct by matching the response against a pre-defined
              pattern or a check-sum. So you can test that a network service  is  really  working
              and supplying the data you expect - not just that the service is running.

              Protocols  that use SSL encryption such as https web sites are fully supported, and
              while checking such services the network tester will automatically run a  check  of
              the  validity  of  the SSL server certificate, and warn about certificates that are
              about to expire.

       Highly configurable alerts
              You want to know when something breaks. But you don't  want  to  get  flooded  with
              alerts all the time. Xymon lets you define several criteria for when to send out an
              alert, so you only get alerts when  there  is  really  something  that  needs  your
              attention  right away. While you are handling an incident, you can tell Xymon about
              it so it stops sending more alerts, and so that everyone else can check with  Xymon
              and know that the problem is being taken care of.

       Combined super-tests and test inter-dependencies
              If  a  single test is not enough, combination tests can be defined that combine the
              result of several tests to a single status-report.  So if you need to monitor  that
              at  least 3 out of 5 servers are running at any time, Xymon can do that for you and
              generate the necessary availability report.

              Tests can also be configured to depend on each  other,  so  that  when  a  critical
              router  goes  down  you  will get alerts only for the router - and not from the 200
              hosts behind the router.

SECURITY

       All of the Xymon server tools run under an unprivileged user account.  A single program  -
       the xymonping(1) network connectivity tester - must be installed setuid-root, but has been
       written so that it drops all root privileges immediately after  performing  the  operation
       that requires root privileges.

       It is recommended that you setup a dedicated account for Xymon.

       Communications  between  the  Xymon  server and Xymon clients use the Big Brother TCP port
       1984. If the Xymon server is  located  behind  a  firewall,  it  must  allow  for  inbound
       connections  to  the  Xymon  server  on  tcp port 1984. Normally, Xymon clients - i.e. the
       servers you are monitoring - must be permitted to connect to  the  Xymon  server  on  this
       port.  However,  if that is not possible due to firewall policies, then Xymon includes the
       xymonfetch(8) and msgcache(8) tools to allows for a pull-style  way  of  collecting  data,
       where it is the Xymon server that initiates connections to the clients.

       The Xymon web pages are dynamically generated through CGI programs.

       Access  to the Xymon web pages is controlled through your web server access controls, e.g.
       you can require a login through some form of HTTP authentication.

DEMONSTRATION SITE

       A site running this software can be seen at http://www.xymon.com/

PREREQUISITES AND INSTALLATION

       You will need a Unix-like system (Linux,  Solaris,  HP-UX,  AIX,  FreeBSD,  Mac  OS  X  or
       similar)  with a web server installed. You will also need a C compiler and some additional
       libraries, but many systems come with the required development tools  and  libraries  pre-
       installed. The required libraries are:

       RRDtool This library is used to store and present trend-data. It is required.

       libpcre   This   library  is  used  for  advanced  pattern-matching  of  text  strings  in
       configuration files. This library is required.

       OpenSSL This  library  is  used  for  communication  with  SSL-enabled  network  services.
       Although  optional,  it  is recommended that you install this for Xymon since many network
       tests do use SSL.

       OpenLDAP This library is used for testing LDAP servers. Use of this is optional.

       For more detailed information about Xymon system requirements and how  to  install  Xymon,
       refer  to the on-line documentation "Installing Xymon" available from the Xymon web server
       (via the "Help" menu), or from the "docs/install.html" file in the Xymon source archive.

SUPPORT and MAILING LISTS

       xymon@xymon.com is an open mailing list for discussions about Xymon.  If you would like to
       participate,  send  an  e-mail  to  xymon-subscribe@xymon.com  to  join the list, or visit
       http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon .

       An archive of the mailing list is available at http://lists.xymon.com/archive/

       If you just want to be notified of new releases of Xymon, please subscribe to  the  xymon-
       announce  mailing  list.  This  is  a  moderated  list, used only for announcing new Xymon
       releases. To be added to the list, send an e-mail to xymon-announce-subscribe@xymon.com or
       visit http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon-announce .

XYMON SERVER TOOLS

       These tools implement the core functionality of the Xymon server:

       xymond(8)  is the core daemon that collects all reports about the status of your hosts. It
       uses a number of helper modules to implement certain tasks such as updating log files  and
       sending  out  alerts: xymond_client, xymond_history, xymond_alert and xymond_rrd. There is
       also a xymond_filestore module for compatibility with Big Brother.

       xymond_channel(8) Implements the communication between the  Xymon  daemon  and  the  other
       Xymon server modules.

       xymond_history(8) Stores historical data about the things that Xymon monitors.

       xymond_rrd(8) Stores trend data, which is used to generate graphs of the data monitored by
       Xymon.

       xymond_alert(8) handles alerts. When a status changes to a  critical  state,  this  module
       decides if an alert should be sent out, and to whom.

       xymond_client(8)  handles data collected by the Xymon clients, analyzes the data and feeds
       back several status updates to Xymon to build the view of the client status.

       xymond_hostdata(8) stores historical client data when something breaks. E.g.  when  a  web
       page  stops  responding  xymond_hostdata will save the latest client data, so that you can
       use this to view a snapshot of how the system state was just prior to it failing.

XYMON NETWORK TEST TOOLS

       These tools are used on servers that execute tests of network services.

       xymonping(1) performs network connectivity (ping) tests.

       xymonnet(1) runs the network service tests.

       xymonnet-again.sh(1) is an extension script for  re-doing  failed  network  tests  with  a
       higher  frequency than the normal network tests. This allows Xymon to pick up the recovery
       of a network service as soon as it happens, resulting in less downtime being recorded.

XYMON TOOLS HANDLING THE WEB USER-INTERFACE

       These tools take care of generating and updating the various Xymon web-pages.

       xymongen(1) takes care of updating the Xymon web pages.

       svcstatus.cgi(1) This CGI program generates an HTML view of a single status  log.   It  is
       used to present the Xymon status-logs.

       showgraph.cgi(1) This CGI program generates graphs of the trend-data collected by Xymon.

       hostgraphs.cgi(1)  When  you  want  to combine multiple graphs into one, this CGI lets you
       combine graphs so you can e.g. compare the load on all of the nodes in your server farm.

       criticalview.cgi(1) Generates the Critical Systems view, based on the  currently  critical
       systems and the configuration of what systems and services you want to monitor when.

       history.cgi(1)  This  CGI  program  generates a web page with the most recent history of a
       particular host+service combination.

       eventlog.cgi(1) This CGI lets you view a log of events that have happened over a period of
       time, for a single host or test, or for multiple systems.

       ack.cgi(1)  This  CGI program allows a user to acknowledge an alert he received from Xymon
       about a host that is in a critical state. Acknowledging  an  alert  serves  two  purposes:
       First,  it  stops more alerts from being sent so the technicians are not bothered wit more
       alerts, and secondly it provides feedback to those looking at the Xymon web pages that the
       problem is being handled.

       xymon-mailack(8)  is  a  tool  for  processing  acknowledgments sent via e-mail, e.g. as a
       response to an e-mail alert.

       enadis.cgi(8) is a CGI program to disable or re-enable hosts or  individual  tests.   When
       disabling  a  host  or  test,  you stop alarms from being sent and also any outages do not
       affect the SLA calculations. So this tool is useful when systems are  being  brought  down
       for maintenance.

       findhost.cgi(1)  is  a CGI program that finds a given host in the Xymon web pages. As your
       Xymon installation grows, it can become difficult to remember exactly which page a host is
       on; this CGI script lets you find hosts easily.

       report.cgi(1)  This  CGI  program  triggers  the generation of Xymon availability reports,
       using xymongen(1) as the reporting back-end engine.

       reportlog.cgi(1) This CGI  program  generates  the  detailed  availability  report  for  a
       particular host+service combination.

       snapshot.cgi(1)  is  a  CGI  program  to  build  the Xymon web pages in a "snapshot" mode,
       showing the look of the web pages at a particular point in time. It  uses  xymongen(1)  as
       the back-end engine.

       statusreport.cgi(1)  is  a  CGI program reporting test results for a single status but for
       several hosts. It is used to e.g. see which SSL certificates are about to  expire,  across
       all of the Xymon web pages.

       csvinfo.cgi(1)  is  a  CGI program to present information about a host. The information is
       pulled from a CSV (Comma Separated  Values)  file,  which  is  easily  exported  from  any
       spreadsheet or database program.

CLIENT-SIDE TOOLS

       logfetch(1)  is  a  utility  used by the Xymon Unix client to collect information from log
       files on the client. It can also monitor various other file-related data, e.g. file  meta-
       data or directory sizes.

       clientupdate(1) Is used on Xymon clients, to automatically update the client software with
       new versions. Through this tool, updates of the client  software  can  happen  without  an
       administrator having to logon to the server.

       msgcache(8)  This  tool  acts  as a mini Xymon server to the client. It stores client data
       internally, so that the xymonfetch(8) utility can pick it up later  and  send  it  to  the
       Xymon  server. It is typically used on hosts that cannot contact the Xymon server directly
       due to network- or firewall-restrictions.

XYMON COMMUNICATION TOOLS

       These tools are used for communications between the Xymon server and the Xymon clients. If
       there are no firewalls then they are not needed, but it may be necessary due to network or
       firewall issues to make use of them.

       xymonproxy(8) is a proxy-server that forwards Xymon messages between clients and the Xymon
       server.  The clients must be able to talk to the proxy, and the proxy must be able to talk
       to the Xymon server.

       xymonfetch(8) is used when the client is not able to make outbound connections to  neither
       xymonproxy  nor  the  Xymon server (typically, for clients located in a DMZ network zone).
       Together with the msgcache(8) utility running on the client, the Xymon server can  contact
       the clients and pick up their data.

OTHER TOOLS

       xymonlaunch(8)  is  a program scheduler for Xymon. It acts as a master program for running
       all of the Xymon tools on a system. On the Xymon server, it controls running  all  of  the
       server  tasks.  On a Xymon client, it periodically launches the client to collect data and
       send them to the Xymon server.

       xymon(1) is the tool used to communicate with the Xymon server.  It is used to send status
       reports  to the Xymon server, through the custom Xymon/BB protocol, or via HTTP. It can be
       used to query the  state  of  tests  on  the  central  Xymon  server  and  retrieve  Xymon
       configuration  files.  The  server-side script xymoncgimsg.cgi(1) used to receive messages
       sent via HTTP is also included.

       xymoncmd(1) is a wrapper for the other Xymon tools which sets up all  of  the  environment
       variables used by Xymon tools.

       xymongrep(1)  is  a  utility  for  use  by Xymon extension scripts. It allows an extension
       script to easily pick out the hosts that are relevant to a script, so it need not parse  a
       huge hosts.cfg file with lots of unwanted test-specifications.

       xymoncfg(1)  is  a  utility  to  dump  the  full hosts.cfg(5) file following any "include"
       statements.

       xymondigest(1) is a utility to compute message digest values for  use  in  content  checks
       that use digests.

       combostatus(1)  is  an  extension  script  for  the  Xymon  server,  allowing you to build
       complicated tests from simpler Xymon test results. E.g. you can define a  test  that  uses
       the results from testing your web server, database server and router to have a single test
       showing the availability of your enterprise web application.

       trimhistory(8) is a tool to trim the Xymon history logs. It will remove  all  log  entries
       and  optionally  also  the  individual status-logs for events that happened before a given
       time.

VERSIONS

       Version 1 of bbgen was released in November 2002, and optimized the web page generation on
       Big Brother servers.

       Version  2  of  bbgen  was released in April 2003, and added a tool for performing network
       tests.

       Version 3 of bbgen was released in September 2004,  and  eliminated  the  use  of  several
       external libraries for network tests, resulting in a significant performance improvement.

       With  version  4.0 released on March 30 2005, the project was de-coupled from Big Brother,
       and the name changed to Hobbit. This version was the  first  full  implementation  of  the
       Hobbit  server, but it still used the data collected by Big Brother clients for monitoring
       host metrics.

       Version 4.1 was released in July  2005  included  a  simple  client  for  Unix.  Log  file
       monitoring was not implemented.

       Version 4.2 was released in July 2006, and includes a fully functional client for Unix.

       Version  4.3 was released in November 2010, and implemented the renaming of the project to
       Xymon. This name was already introduced in 2008 with a patch  version  of  4.2,  but  with
       version 4.3.0 this change of names was fully implemented.

COPYRIGHT

       Xymon is
         Copyright (C) 2002-2011 Henrik Storner <henrik@storner.dk>
       Parts of the Xymon sources are from public-domain or other freely available sources. These
       are   the   the   Red-Black   tree   implementation,   and    the    MD5-,    SHA1-    and
       RIPEMD160-implementations. Details of the license for these is in the README file included
       with the Xymon sources.  All other files are released under the GNU General Public License
       version  2, with the additional exemption that compiling, linking, and/or using OpenSSL is
       allowed.  See the file COPYING for details.

SEE ALSO

       xymond(8),   xymond_channel(8),   xymond_history(8),    xymond_rrd(8),    xymond_alert(8),
       xymond_client(8),  xymond_hostdata(8),  xymonping(1),  xymonnet(1),  xymonnet-again.sh(1),
       xymongen(1), svcstatus.cgi(1), showgraph.cgi(1),  hostgraphs.cgi(1),  criticalview.cgi(1),
       history.cgi(1),     eventlog.cgi(1),    ack.cgi(1),    xymon-mailack(8),    enadis.cgi(8),
       findhost.cgi(1), report.cgi(1),  reportlog.cgi(1),  snapshot.cgi(1),  statusreport.cgi(1),
       csvinfo.cgi(1),  logfetch(1),  clientupdate(1), msgcache(8), xymonproxy(8), xymonfetch(8),
       xymonlaunch(8),  xymon(1),  xymoncgimsg.cgi(1),  xymoncmd(1),  xymongrep(1),  xymoncfg(1),
       xymondigest(1),     combostatus(1),     trimhistory(8),     hosts.cfg(5),    tasks.cfg(5),
       xymonserver.cfg(5), alerts.cfg(5), analysis.cfg(5), client-local.cfg(5)