OK, I'll chime in since I know a little about Big Brother.
Let's divide it up into different areas. I don't know much about Nagios, so someone else will have to chime in.
What problem are you trying to solve?
This may not be as straightforward as it appears. Maybe the boss wants to keep an eye on stuff as well. Maybe politically new people want a new thing, or a majority of people already know one or the other system. That stuff will really be key in what gets used.
Xymon / BB is great for publishing system information in a manner that mere mortals and bosses can consume. You can beat red/yellow/ green and purple(!) on a grid for a fast overview, or for putting up on a big screen in a NOC. So a quick test is give both screens to your management and let them ponder it.
A downside of that is the Xymon / BB interface looks old. I mean 'party like it's 1999 old'. That's probably one of the biggest things against it. A new skin would help a great deal here since the underlying testing of stuff is pretty well the same.
How much custom stuff do you have in the environment already running, and how long is it going to take to get it replicated in the new environment?
Ditto notification systems, failover, etc.
Ultimately, how much do I trust each of these systems to tell me when there's something wrong. These things are going to wake me up in the middle of the night... and people depend on the systems they monitor. So who do you want in the admin foxhole with you? It takes time to develop a level of proficiency and trust in a system...
The quick answer is 'let's spin one up and compare apples to apples'. At the end of the exercise, it should be clearer what the costs will be.
[And of course, if the answer is 'Nagios' you can leave Xymon/BB running very quietly in the background to save your ass].
Nikolai Lifanov wrote:
On 02/08/15 20:36, Andrew Rakowski wrote:
I've been using Big Brother since 1999, and Xymon for the last couple of years (on a different project at the lab), but recently, a team member has suggested that we switch infrastructure monitoring to Nagios, which he's been using on other systems he manages elsewhere in the lab.
He's using something called OMD (the Open Monitoring Distribution - from http://omdistro.org/ ), which is supposed to improve on the complexity of using Nagios. Our management would like us to do a comparison to see if we should switch from our old Big Brother monitoring (which is still running well) to a more up to date Xymon or convert instead to OMD/Nagios.
Looking for information on Xymon and Nagios comparisons, I found this comment from Henrik in the Xymon mailing list archive:
http://lists.xymon.com/archive/2006-June/007530.htmlthat mentions the ease of setup and use of Xymon as compared to Nagios, but that comment is nine years old.
Daniel's recent comments on this list about wanting to move from Nagios to Xymon:
On Fri, 6 Feb 2015, LOZOVSKY, DANIEL L wrote (in part):
Subject: Re: [Xymon] Installing xymon/apache as a non-root user
[...snip...]
community. I have been pushing AT&T to utilize xymon instead of nagios. I have been using BB open source version for almost 10 years and it really saved us at Supply Chain. Of course, I had to make a lot of modifications to it. Xymon is the next logical step to help make things much better. [...snip...]
has me wondering what I can point to as good reasons to use Xymon vs Nagios, as certainly, people do want to switch.
So, what are reasons that folks like Xymon better than Nagios (besides all the helpful info from the great group of folks I've been reading during my years of lurking on the list...)?
Best regards,
-Andrew
Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon
For the sake of good investigation, I would ask the same question on Nagios MLs as well. You will find that people here tend to have positive things to say about Xymon.
- Nikolai Lifanov
Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon
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