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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>About the Xymon</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>About Xymon</h1>
<p>In this document:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="#whatisxymon">What is Xymon ?</a></li>
<li><a href="#download">Where can I download Xymon ?</a></li>
<li><a href="#mailinglists">Support</a></li>
<li><a href="#addons">Are there any other sites with Xymon stuff?</a></li>
<li><a href="#whoareyou">Who are you ?</a></li>
</ul>
<h3><a name="whatisxymon">What is Xymon ?</a></h3>
<p>Xymon is a tool for monitoring servers, applications and networks.
It collects information about the health of your computers, the
applications running on them, and the network connectivity between
them. All of this information is presented in a set of simple,
intuitive webpages that are updated frequently to reflect changes
in the status of your systems.</p>
<p>Xymon is capable of monitoring a vast set of network services,
e.g. mail-servers, web-servers (both plain HTTP and encrypted
HTTPS), local server application logs, ressource utilisation
and much more.</p>
<p>Much of the information is processed and stored in RRD files,
which then form the basis for providing trend graphs showing
how e.g. webserver response-times vary over time.</p>
<p>Xymon was inspired by the Big Brother monitoring tool,
a freely available tool from BB4 Technologies (now part of Quest
Software) with some of the features that Xymon has.
But Xymon is better than Big Brother in many ways:</p>
<ul>
<li>Xymon can handle monitoring lots of systems.<br>
<p>Big Brother is implemented mostly as shell-scripts, and performance
suffers badly from this. In large networks where you need to monitor
hundreds or thousands of hosts, processing of the data simply
cannot keep up. Another problem with BB is that it stores all
status-information in individual files; when you have lots of
hosts and statuses, the amount of disk I/O triggered by this
severely limits how many systems you can monitor with one
BB server.<br>
Xymon avoids these performance bottlenecks by
keeping most of the ever-changing data in memory instead of
on-disk, and by being implemented in C rather than shell scripts.</p></li>
<li>Xymon has a centralized configuration.</br>
<p>Xymon keeps <b>all</b> configuration data in one place: On
the Xymon server. Big Brother has lots of configuration files
stored on the individual servers being monitored, so to change
a setting you may need to logon to several servers and change
each of them individually.</li>
<li>Xymon is easy to setup and deploy.<br>
<p>Big Brother has a huge number of add-ons, available from the
<a href="http://www.deadcat.net/">www.deadcat.net</a> site. This
is both a blessing and a curse - you can find anything you need
as an add-on, but many of the add-ons really ought to have been
part of the base package. E.g. the ability to track historical
performance data, simple things such as monitoring SSL-enabled services
and SSL certificates, or just something as simple as a GUI for
temporarily disabling monitoring of a system. Maintaining and improving
all of these add-ons gets really complex.<br>
Xymon has all of these features built-in so you don't have to worry
about getting the right add-ons and maintaining them - they come with
the base package.<br>
Also, when it comes to deploying the client-side packages, Xymon
clients require no configuration changes when you install them on
multiple hosts. So you can setup a template client installation,
and then blindly copy it to all of your hosts.</p></li>
<li>Xymon is actively being developed.<br>
<p>New Xymon versions appear regularly, usually every 4-6 months. In
contrast, development of Big Brother appears to have stopped - at least
when it comes to the non-commercial (BTF) version.</p></li>
<li>Xymon is licensed as Open Source - Big Brother is not.<br>
<p>Although the BB "Better-than-Free" license permits the use of
BB for non-commercial use without having to buy a license, it
is still a non-free package in the Open Source sense. I fully
respect the decision of the people behind Big Brother to choose
the licensing terms they find best - just as I can choose the
licensing terms that I find best for the software I develop.
It is my sincere belief that an Open Source license works best
for a project such as Xymon, where community involvement is
essential to get a tool capable of monitoring as many different
systems as possible.</p>
<p>An interesting <a href="http://www.moonviewscientific.com/essays/software_lifecycle.htm">essay</a> appeared recently, which tries to explain
why Open Source is the natural way for a software product to
evolve. If you are curious as to why the trend seems to be that
more and more software exist in an Open Source version, I suggest
you have a look at it.</p></li>
</ul>
<h3>Didn't you write something called "bbgen" and "Hobbit" ?</h3>
<p>Yes I did. The <b>bbgen toolkit</b> was the name I used for
Xymon from 2002 until the end of 2004 (i.e. bbgen version 1.x,
2.x and 3.x). The bbgen versions relied on a Big Brother server
to hold the monitoring data and status logs, and this turned out
to be a real performance problem for me. So I needed to completely
replace Big Brother with something more powerful. In March 2005
version 4 was ready and capable of operating without any need for
a Big Brother server, so I decided to change the name to avoid
any misunderstanding about whether this was an add-on to Big Brother,
or a replacement for it. Xymon no longer has any relation to Big
Brother.</p>
<p>From 2005 until November 2008 the project was called
"Hobbit". However, it turned out that this is a
trademarked name, and I was asked to stop using it. Therefore
the project is now called Xymon.</p>
<h3>Why did you call it Xymon ?</h3>
<p>During the late summer and autumn of 2008 several new names
for the project were discussed on the mailing list. I was looking
for a name that was short, easy to pronounce, free of any legal
ties, and a suitable group of domain names should be available.
"Xymon" fit all of these criteria, and just sounded
right to me - "XY" could be seen as meaning "anything"
and "mon" is short for "monitor". So "Xymon"
really just means "The Anything Monitor".
<h3>Why should I use Xymon ? My Big Brother setup works just fine.</h3>
<p>It is your choice. I think Xymon has many improvements over BB,
so I would of course say 'Yes, I think you should'. But in the end
it is You who have to deal with the hassle of setting up and learning
a new system, so if you are comfortable with what Big Brother is
doing for you now, I am not forcing you to switch. If you want to
see what some of the Xymon users think about changing to Xymon,
check out <a href="http://www.xymon.com/archive/2006/08/msg00034.html">this thread</a>
(continued <a href="http://www.xymon.com/archive/2006/08/msg00041.html">here</a>)
from the Xymon mailing list archive. The executive summary of those
messages is that You won't regret switching.</p>
<h3><a name="download">So where can I download Xymon?</a></h3>
<p>The Xymon sources are available on the
<a href="http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/xymon/">project page</a>
at Sourceforge.</p>
<h3><a name="mailinglists">Support</a></h3>
<p>There are two mailing lists about Xymon:
<ul>
<li>The <b>xymon@xymon.com</b> mailing list is for general discussion about Xymon.
To avoid spam you must be a subscriber to the list before you are allowed to post mesages.
To subscribe to the list, send an e-mail to
<a href="mailto:xymon-subscribe@xymon.com">xymon-subscribe@xymon.com</a>, or
visit the <a href="http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon">list homepage</a>.<br>
There is an <a href="http://lists.xymon.com/archive/">archive</a> of the list.</li>
<li>The <b>xymon-announce</b> list is an announcement-list where new versions of Xymon will
be announced. You can subscribe to the list by sending an e-mail to
<a href="mailto:xymon-announce-subscribe@xymon.com">xymon-announce-subscribe@xymon.com</a>,
or visit the <a href="http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon-announce">list homepage</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>If you have a specific problem with something that is not working,
first check the <a href="known-issues.html">list of known issues</a>,
and try to search the <a href="http://www.xymon.com/archive/">list archive</a>.
If you don't find the answer, post a message to the Xymon mailing list -
I try to answer questions about Xymon in that forum.</p>
<h3><a name="addons">Are there any other sites with Xymon stuff?</a></h3>
<p>Several projects have sprung up around Xymon:</p>
<ul>
<li><b>BBWin</b> is a client for Microsoft Windows systems. It is
available from the <a href="http://bbwin.sourceforge.net/">BBWin project</a> page
at Sourceforge. However, currently (October 2010) development seems to have
stalled. A new Windows client based on Powershell is currently undergoing
intense development, and the core server-side functionality is included in
Xymon 4.3.0. The client itself is available from Sourceforge at the
<a href="http://xymon.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xymon/sandbox/WinPSClient/">Xymon sandbox projects</a> page.
</li>
<li><b>DevMon</b> is a tool to collect data from SNMP-capable devices.
It is available from the <a href="http://devmon.sourceforge.net/">DevMon project</a> page
at SourceForge.</li>
<li><b>hobbit-perl-cl</b> is an add-on to Xymon for monitoring <b>databases,
BEA Weblogic servers, and NetApp boxes</b>. It is available from the
<a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/hobbit-perl-cl/">hobbit-perl-cl project</a> page
at SourceForge.</li>
<li><b>Xymonton</b> is a site hosting a collection of add-ons for Xymon, including
stuff like monitors for <b>Solaris zones</b> (the "zonestat" monitor).</li>
<li>The Xymon <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/System_Monitoring_with_Hobbit">Wiki</a>
has some information about Xymon usage.</li>
<li><b>Deadcat</b> is a repository for Big Brother extensions. Although
these were written for Big Brother, most of these can be used with Xymon
with little or no extra work since Xymon is compatible with the Big
Brother extensions. See the <a href="http://www.deadcat.net/">Deadcat site</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h3><a name="whoareyou">Who are you ?</a></h3>
<p>My name is Henrik Storner. I was born in 1964, and live in
Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark which is a small country in the
northern part of Europe. I have a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University
of Copenhagen, and have been working with computers and Unix systems
professionally since 1984. I have been developing bits and pieces of Open
Source software for the past 15 years - you'll find my name in the
<a href="http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/CREDITS">Linux kernel CREDITS file</a> -
and I am actively involved in the local Linux Users Group
<a href="http://www.sslug.dk/">SSLUG</a>, one of the largest LUG's world-wide,
where I am a systems administrator for their Internet servers (web, e-mail, news).</p>
<p>I started using Big Brother around 1998, for monitoring a bunch of
servers that I was administering. In late 2001 I began working for
the CSC Managed Web Services division in Copenhagen, and one of my
first tasks was to improve on the monitoring and SLA reporting. After
looking at what the standard tools could do, I decided to setup a
Big Brother system as a demonstration of what could be done. This was
an immediate success. Systems were rapidly added to the Big Brother
monitor, and I began to see some of the scalability problems that
happen when you go from monitoring 50 servers to monitoring 500
(not to mention the 2500 hosts we are currently - 2006 - keeping tabs on).
So I decided it was time to do something about it, and during the
autumn and early winter 2002 bbgen was born. The rest is history.</p>
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