I should also mention that the basic graphing is a tremendous time saver. The fact that almost all of it works out of the box and for basic things like ping, disk space, etc saves a huge headache of having to jump back and forth between mrtg/cacti and hobbit. While I believe in the separaton of apps for most areas, this is one I'm reluctanct to separate readily.
Cacti does my real graphing, like bandwidth/temperature and stuff, but hobbit gives me some meat right there - no search, no wandering, no switching tabs, just concomitant graphs and statuses.
On 5/22/06, Dan Vande More <bigdan at gmail.com> wrote:
IIRC, nagios doesn't support string matching like looking for 250 on an smtp connection, or a 200/301 on an http connection without a special plugin - it merely checks to see if the port responds. This is one of hobbit's greatest strengths and one of the reasons I chose it.
Also, I believe, though it's just an opinion, that hobbit/bb's client configuration is much more "standardized" (for lack of better term). It's far more likely that I can take a hobbit client and move it to an entirely different system and it would work with very little configuration. The same did not seem to hold true for nagios. In fact, I remember downloading nagios extensions from the share site and "porting" them to my servers. IOW, the bb client knew where grep was, where top was, etc. Nagios does not.
Nagios also cannot send you more than the first line of text on a notifcation. A huge problem for me. When I'm out and I get a page, I want to see the whole message so I can decide whether to up the priority and get to a computer, or ignore it because it was a some transient error.
Built in configurability is important. The fact that hobbit can almost instantly and natively work with https,pop3s, imaps, ldapssl is great. The flexibility in dns libraries is nice for troubleshooting. And on, and on...
The nagios page always seemed heavy and was uncomfortably large to download from a pda while out. It was also impossible to navigate. While hobbit isn't made to work with pdas with little resolution, it actually works really well.
I'm not going to argue that either is faster, I do know that hobbit is very, very fast and I know this as well as security are among the top priorities for Henrik and since they match my priorities well, it was no contest.
Henrik also seems to take the "Do it right" approach which I like too. Instead of kludging code together to put in some haphazard feature, he actually seems to take a deep breath and think about things before implementing them. This means once something is in hobbit you know it's been pretty well thought through and will probably remain relatively stable and will not be a drag on the code later.
Additionally, I like how patches/bugs can be submitted and Henrik fixes them usually almost immediately. While it might seem to not be a big deal because it's just a simple thing he missed, it adds an enormous amount of credence to the project.
Finally, not to say nagios code is not cleanly, but hobbit's code is very easy to read, understand and work on from my point of view.
Dan
On 5/22/06, T.J. Yang <tj_yang at hotmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
As much as I dont want to move away from Hobbit/Big Brother I have been asked to compare Hobbit to Nagios. I would imagine quite a number of people on this list have experienced many of the offerings out theere before changing to hobbit or using a combination of products.
I've done a quick google and there is a bit of stuff out there but obviously the more the merrier.
So yeah pros cons from all aspects would be quite welcome and perhaps the results could be stuck up on the Wiki somewhere
if someone are willing to contribute the comparison efforts. How about here ?
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/System_Monitoring_with_Hobbit/User_Guide#System...
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