We use Xymon to monitor every non-personal machine connected to the department network. As a minimum we check for network connectivity. More complex, highly managed, or important machines can have many more tests configured. The data is available through webpages which present each test as a coloured dot. Red is bad, green is good, and there are a few other colours in between.
Xymon currently monitors about 15,000 things. That’s a lot of dots to look at so the data also feeds into the ticket system; tickets are automatically created for important services with red dots.
The main Xymon web pages are available to all chemists at http://hobbit.ch.cam.ac.uk/hobbit/. However this view of the data is designed to help computer officers look for high priority problems and doesn’t give a good overview of each research group; it can hard to find what you want in the sea of Xymon dots.
We now have a custom view which presents the data in format that’s easier to read. Each research group has a dot. The colour of the dot is the colour of the ‘worst’ test within that group at the time. Click on the dot to see all the tests for that group in one page.
http://hobbit.ch.cam.ac.uk/hobbit/prettyrgs/