Using xymon to monitor status of cfengine

During the deployment of the cfengine one of my biggest concerns was how to make sure that it is working as expected. Obviously there are multiple elements in the engine itself that can alert or even better - fix many issues.

Free version doesn't provide reporting, trends ... - no visualization but it has enough to build external analyzers and reporting, also external tests will give you a bit more confidence that everything is OK (or something is wrong)

As a main monitoring platform I'm using xymon and it's functionality can be easy extended.

Initially I'd like to ensure that all agents are alive and really talking to the server(s)
In my case I'm expecting that connection is established approximately every 5 min (default behavior), so you should expect that "last seen" value is less than 5 min + "splaytime".

Code of the extension is available for download from google code page

Or checkout most current version from svn:

svn co https://abris.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/xymon-ext/cfengine

requirements:

• cfengine3
• python 2.6+

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Example of a healthy chart, looking from the cfserver:

Significant spikes in the chart indicate that you need to check status of the suspicions agent

I'm planning to add more features on this test , so stay tuned.

Xymon 4.3.0 beta-3 available

New beta of Xymon monitoring system was released.

Download in from Sourceforge

Many thanks to Henrik and the team!!!

There are plenty of improvements since previous release (and even from beta2), so upgrade could be tricky, but it worth it.


From Release Notes:

Xymon 4.3.0 is the first release with new features after
the 4.2.0 release. Several large changes have been made
throughout the entire codebase. Some highlights (see
the Changes file for a longer list):

* Data going into graphs can now be used to alter a status,
  e.g. to trigger an alert from the response time of a network
  service.
* Tasks in xymonlaunch can be be configured to run at specific
  time of day using a cron-style syntax for when they must run.
* Worker modules (RRD, client-data parsers etc) can operate on
  remote hosts from the xymond daemon, for load-sharing.
* Support for defining holidays as non-working days in alerts and
  SLA calculations.
* Hosts which appear on multiple pages in the web display can
  use any page they are on in the alerting rules and elsewhere.
* Various new network tests: SOAP-over-HTTP, HTTP tests with
  session cookies, SSL minimum encryption strength test.
* New "compact" status display can group multiple statuses into
  one on the webpage display.
* Configurable periods for graphs on the trends page.
* RRD files can be configured to maintain more data and/or
  different data (e.g. MAX/MIN values)
* SLA calculations now include the number of outages in addition
  to the down-time.

Several minor issues with beta3 are already addressed in svn repository and in posts on the mailing list, but generally it works very stable ( I've tested it on FreeBSD and Opensolaris platforms)