On 2/7/07, Jones, Jason (Altrincham) <JasonAS_Jones at mentor.com> wrote:
Why does it seem that all hobbit administrators are instantly rebelling? Our monitoring solutions are supposed to be Nagios and Big Brother, they are what the corporate gurus sitting on their chair decree and what we...ignore. I digress, but the point is that my predecessor did some research into various monitoring solutions (and while I don't have his notes) he chose hobbit because of the community, Henrik's willingness to lend a hand when needed and of course it's free (an easy way to make a manager sign-off on it :) ).
Around here, it's a question of "if it breaks, who can we blame??" However, my recently-ex manager's attitude was "whatever it takes to get the job done". She asked me to work the monitoring desk for awhile, at a time when the web checks consisted of a list of URLs to visit twice per shift. It didn't take many nights to get some scripts together to feed BB, thereby saving about 1/2 head per shift and running the checks every ten minutes. That was back in 2000. My old DL380 has gone down 3 times since then - once to move it, once was a kernel crash, once when it blew its power supply - whereas the TNG infrastructure seems to need booting and/or reinstalling regularly. That power supply blowout was my excuse to switch to Hobbit - I had a working Hobbit server being fed by BB, with all the scripts almost ready to run.
One other thing I am confused about is that companies invariably benefit from expertise in their company, especially when using a utility such as hobbit - which is why I was afforded the luxury of reading through some of the hobbit man-pages when I first started, so ask yourself this who knows more about a program than the person who programmed it?!? So surely your company benefits a lot more from your input/expertise than mine, and mine has helped a great deal, or so I am told.
We're an IT outsourcing company. I'm not anywhere near the sales side, but I've heard that prospective clients generally want to know how we're going to monitor their stuff. I suppose they get a nice warm fuzzy feeling when the sales critter tells them about the multi-million-dollar monitoring solutions we have available. Telling a customer the monitor is free and light enough to run on a 486 w/FreeBSD just isn't going to win contracts... :) The word slowly seeps out, though. BB, and now Hobbit, regularly catches things that TNG doesn't see, including excessive cpu use in some TNG boxes - yep, I'm running snmpwalk against some TNG infrastructure and feeding Hobbit the results. Seems like TNG isn't so hot at watching itself for some reason...
Ralph Mitchell