• support.sas.com

• Knowledge Base

• Support

• Training & Bookstore

• Happenings

• Support Communities

Xymon Monitor: An Open-Source System Management Facility

The Enterprise Management Integration (EMI) community site is organized to provide SAS^®9 enterprise business intelligence customers with tips, techniques, and tools for integrating and interfacing with vendor enterprise IT system management facilities. In working with SAS customers, the EMI team has observed the need for organizations to have an open-source method of systems management. Xymon Monitor, an open-source systems monitoring facility, is a suitable solution for this need. Xymon Monitor is available through SourceForge, a Web site (www.sourceforge.com) that provides free hosting for open-source projects.

Xymon Monitor Features, Components, and Considerations

Xymon Monitor's features and capabilities enable you to monitor servers, applications, and networks. The system provides a set of easy-to-use, Web-based interfaces (as shown in the following example) to monitor the health of network nodes and applications.

Xymon Monitor Features

Xymon Monitor has simple, elegant, intuitive, and robust installation and configuration features:

• The installation process is almost effortless.
• Configuration is simple and straightforward, using keywords and tags.
• Xymon provides a wealth of health information, without additional configuration steps.
• You can easily add customized scripts for site installation requirements.

Xymon Monitor Components

Xymon Monitor provides a robust suite of alert and reporting components. You can also extend and customize the system's capabilities for your organization's unique monitoring and management requirements. Xymon Monitor components include:

• the Xymon Server, which collects system health statistics on connectivity; CPU, memory, and disk utilization; process status; and related operating-system metrics
• the Xymon UNIX client and the BBWin client for Windows, both of which report the health statistics to the server
• integrated facilities for historical reporting, graphing, finding trends, and administration
• Web-based methods to acknowledge, test, and enable or disable alerts
• UNIX methods that use shell language scripts to extend the features.

Xymon Monitor Considerations and Additional Resources

Before you make a decision to use Xymon Monitor, you need to consider the following:

• Xymon Monitor is an open source project, distributed under GNU GPL License. Enterprise customers might have restrictions on the use of GNU GPL software.
• Xymon Monitor is supported on most UNIX and Linux operating systems.
• Xymon clients are available for UNIX and Linux operating systems, with a compatible client (BBWin) available for Windows operating systems.

Additional information about Xymon Monitor is available from these resources:

• Xymon Monitor Sourceforge Project
• BBWin Sourceforge Project
• Xymonton
• Xymon / BBWin Extensions

SAS 9.1.3 and Xymon Monitor Integration

The EMI team has integrated Xymon Monitor with the SAS 9.1.3 business intelligence (BI) architecture, providing an inexpensive, simplified system for monitoring the operational status of your SAS BI servers. SAS customers can download a copy of our integration documentation, Using Xymon Monitor with SAS 9.1.3 BI Servers - An Appetizer.

SAS Sample Xymon Automatic Configuration Program for UNIX

In addition to the Xymon Monitor integration documentation, the team has implemented a sample .SAS program to execute on your UNIX-based SAS metadata server to dynamically create the SAS versions of the Xymon /etc/bb-hosts and /etc/hobbit-client.cfg files.

SAS Sample BBWin Automatic Configuration Program for Windows

And for those environments that are utilizing BBWin client monitoring, the EMI team has developed a Windows-based sample .SAS program to execute on your Windows hosts to dynamically create the customizations that are required in the /etc/BBwin.cfg files to monitor Windows services for your SAS servers.

SAS 9.2 Enterprise Business Intelligence Support for Xymon Monitor

The Xymon Monitor package for SAS 9.1.3 behaves without modification in a SAS 9.2 Enterprise BI Server environment.

NOTE:

Provide Feedback

We are very interested in hearing from you about your experience with the Xymon Monitor integration package. Please click here to send us your feedback. Thank you!