I have used, and currently am using the entire CA suite where I work. While it is capable of many things, it is STUNNINGLY complicated and requires an army of people to maintain and a mountain of top level hardware to run on. In addition, it requires so many agents to be installed on the monitored hosts that it can be it's own worst enemy. We actually discovered on one of our hosts that 70% of cpu and 85% of memory were being used up by the agents! Also, the price for software and associated licenses from Microsoft is so high that it is beyond the financial means of most small to medium sized companies!
By contrast, Hobbit is easy to setup, quite simple to maintain, and can easily run on a piece of junk without any problem. In addition, the agents associated with it are virtually invisible with respect to system resources....and the price is quite attractive as well!!
K
T.J. Yang wrote:
Thanks for your comment, I don't have experience of using CA. But if I have chance to review this product, I know where to look for problem ;)
Regards
tj
From: "Ralph Mitchell" <ralphmitchell at gmail.com> Reply-To: hobbit at hswn.dk To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Informal survey about commercial support for Hobbit Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 06:01:06 -0500
On 9/22/06, T.J. Yang <tj_yang at hotmail.com> wrote:
I really like to see how Hobbit compare to Tivoli,CA .. enterprise class systems. Management would like to see unbiased review of monitoring systems.
Well, I can't really give you an unbiased view of CA, but I can tell you that as of the last time I looked (about 2 years ago), Unicenter's Web Monitoring Option (WMO) sucked big time. I wrote up a long email rant fairly recently for a co-worker, which I won't repeat here, but just to hit some highlights:
o The WMO agent crashes if you "click the icons too fast" - that's actual word-for-word from CA themselves.
o If any checks are disabled, they automatically get re-enabled when the agent starts up. See above point...
o The reports show up on the Event Console with the nodename of the machine running the check, *not* the nodename with the problem.
o The checks are written in a sort of XML format, and the builtin editor is nasty.
o The check can execute an external program, but there's no way to pick up any output from it. I needed that, obviously...
OK, I'll stop there before my blood pressure gets any higher.
The above was enough justification for my manager to scrap the "switch from Big Brother to WMO at all costs" plan. So I'm still happily banging out Bourne shell scripts that use curl to grab web pages, with the reports being delivered to Hobbit.
Ralph Mitchell
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