Xymon is a system for monitoring of hosts and networks, inspired by the Big Brother system. It provides real-time monitoring, an easy web-interface, historical data, availability reports and performance graphs.

Installing Xymon. This describes how to setup a Xymon server for monitoring your systems. It assumes that you are setting up a full Xymon server - i.e. either you do not have a Big Brother server, or you will replace it completely with Xymon.

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:

With the Xymon client running and reporting data into Xymon, you should see the cpu-, disk-, memory- and procs-columns appear. The color of these status columns is determined by settings in the analysis.cfg configuration file.

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.

Alternatively, you may setup a proxy using the xymonproxy tool (part of Xymon) to forward status messages from a protected network to the Xymon server. Other methods are also possible, e.g. bbfetch (available from the www.deadcat.net archive.

Since you probably don't have the Xymon webpages in view all of the time, Xymon can generate alerts to draw your attention to problems. Alerts can go out as e-mail, or Xymon can run a script that takes care of activating a pager, sending an SMS, or however you prefer to get alerted.

This document walks you through the setup of custom graphs in your Xymon installation. Although Xymon comes with pre-defined setups for a lot of common types of graphs, it is also extensible allowing you to add your own tests. For many kinds of tests, it is nice to view them over a period of time in a graph - this document tells you how to do that.

xymonnet(1) handles the network tests of hosts defined in the Xymon configuration file, hosts.cfg. It is normally run at regular intervals by xymonlaunch (8) via an entry in the tasks.cfg (5) file.

These branch-office Xymon have a "summary" definition in their hosts.cfg file that makes them report the overall status of their branch Xymon to the central Xymon server you maintain at the corporate headquarters.