Copenhagen, March 31 2005I am pleased to announce the availability of the
Hobbit Monitor version 4systems- and network-monitoring package. Hobbit is available from the SourceForge archive at http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/
Hobbit is a systems- and network-monitoring system, designed to handle large networks with thousands of hosts. However, it is also simple to setup and extremely light-weight, so using it on a small network with just a few servers is also possible.
Hobbit lets you monitor network services - e.g. Web-, mail-, LDAP- and DNS-servers - by sending them full requests and checking if the response is as expected.
Clients can be installed on the monitored hosts to collect performance metrics, e.g. cpu-, disk- and memory-utilisation.
All data is available via an easy-to-use web-based interface, both the current real-time state of the services, and the historical information about past events. Graphs of the collected data are automatically generated and available immediately.
A live demonstration of the Hobbit monitor can be found at the authors' website, http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit/
A flexible alert mechanism allows for events to trigger alerts via e-mail, or you can easily integrate a pager mechanism to alert you of problems. Alerts can be customised to match the business requirements, so you can monitor hosts on a 24x7 basis, or using whatever schedule is appropriate.
Hobbit builds on the popular "bbgen" tools previously distributed as an add-on to the "Big Brother" monitor from Quest Software, but is a complete re-design and re-implementation of the monitoring server. Hobbit does not require any previous Big Brother installation, but if you have used Big Brother previously, you can easily migrate to Hobbit.
Hobbit is Open Source software, released under the GNU GPL license.
Regards, Henrik