| The Xymon Monitor

Welcome to the Xymon Monitor project homepage. Xymon is a system for monitoring servers and networks. It takes its inspiration from the Big Brother monitoring system, but unlike Big Brother it is designed to work well whether you need to monitor a small network with just a handful of hosts, or large networks with thousands of servers and network services.

Xymon is the successor to the bbgen toolkit, which has been available as an add-on to Big Brother since late 2002. The name change was decided upon when Xymon acquired enough functionality to be a stand-alone product. The tools that formed the bbgen toolkit are still present in Xymon and are quite important for it, so if you have used bbgen before Xymon will seem quite familiar.

The project was previously called Hobbit. In 2009 the project was renamed to Xymon.

What does Xymon do ?

Xymon monitors your hosts, your network services, and anything else you configure it to do via extensions. Xymon can periodically generate requests to network services - http, ftp, smtp and so on - and record if the service is responding as expected. You can also monitor local disk utilisation, logfiles and processes through the use of agents installed on the servers.

All of the monitoring results are collected by a central server and used to build a set of webpages that show the status of your network, with drill-down functionality to check up on problems. Xymon will also record the history of each monitored item, so you can generate availability reports and check on the incidents that have occurred. Wherever possible data is also stored for trend analysis and presented as graphs, so you can easily track e.g. the response-time of a business-critical web application over time.

In case of problems alerts may be sent in the form of e-mails, SMS-messages or pager-alerts so that staff can respond quickly to problems without having to keep watch over the services.

The easiest way to understand what Xymon does is to see it in action. https://www.xymon.com/ is the live view of a Xymon server that monitors Henrik's home network.

For more about Xymon, see the links below:

• About Xymon
• Installing a standalone Xymon server
• Configuring Xymon
• Setting up alerts
• Known problems
• Tips and Tricks
• Custom graphs
• Xymon man-pages

Where can I get Xymon?

The production release of Xymon 4.3 was released in March 2011. The current stable release of Xymon is 4.3.30, released Sep 5, 2019. You can pick up Xymon at the Xymon Sourceforge project page.

Version 4.4 is currently under development.

What if I have questions about Xymon?

There is a mailing list for Xymon:

• The xymon@xymon.com is for general discussion about Xymon. To subscribe to the list, send an e-mail to xymon-subscribe@xymon.com or go to the web registration page at http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon. An archive of the list is available at http://lists.xymon.com/archive

The official project wiki is at SourceForge, but content needs to be migrated from wikibooks.org

Xymon is hosted by