I tried out nagios and one huge winning factor for Hobbit was simplicity. I put quite a bit of time into getting nagios off the ground with little luck. And in the same amount of time, I was able to get nearly all functionality I required out of a monitoring program.

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...

To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk

-- Matthew Davis http://familycampground.org/matthew/

Henrik:

I heard a rumor that Nagios has an optional client that does not have to be compiled. Don't know if this is true, but it would sure help me out if there was a "Perl-only" or "Perl+shell" client that I could use on the one or two systems where I cannot install all the junk needed to compile a Hobbit client binary. Binary Perl distributions that just drop in are usually available... I know there would be a performance hit, but I would rather have a more expensive-to-run client than no client.

Thoughts?

GLH -----Original Message----- From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk] Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 9:33 AM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Hobbit vs Nagios

On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 09:47:47PM -0400, Matthew Davis wrote:

I tried out nagios and one huge winning factor for Hobbit was simplicity. I put quite a bit of time into getting nagios off the ground with little luck. And in the same amount of time, I was able to get nearly all functionality I required out of a monitoring program.

I had a funny experience last week. There was a Linux Users group meeting here in Copenhagen, where the subject was "Setting up Nagios". Since I'm always interested to see what the competitors look like, I attended. The guy who told about Nagios knew that I am behind Hobbit, as did a couple of the people in the audience. So when the talk about Nagios was over and there was some spare time left, they asked me if I could give a quick overview of Hobbit. Which I did, thanks to a wireless Internet connection they managed to setup quickly.

After about an hour, someone in the audience asked the Nagios guy "after hearing about Nagios and Hobbit tonight, why didn't you just install Hobbit?"

I think that tells a lot about how easy it is to setup Hobbit compared to Nagios.

Regards, Henrik

To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk

The problem is that these machines are the only ones of their type. Or I would do what you suggest...

GLH

From: Charles Jones [mailto:jonescr at cisco.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 12:05 PM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: Re: [hobbit] Hobbit vs Nagios


Hubbard, Greg L wrote: 

	Henrik:
	
	I heard a rumor that Nagios has an optional client that

does not have to be compiled. Don't know if this is true, but it would sure help me out if there was a "Perl-only" or "Perl+shell" client that I could use on the one or two systems where I cannot install all the junk needed to compile a Hobbit client binary. Binary Perl distributions that just drop in are usually available... I know there would be a performance hit, but I would rather have a more expensive-to-run client than no client.

You should be able to statically compile the client on another

machine that is the same OS, and then copy it to the target machine. Perhaps Henrik could add a --static option to the configure so that you wouldn't have to hack the Makefile to do it..

That's a good idea, I forgot about that Perl version of bb. Hmm I wonder if there is anything special that the bb binary does to send it's data, such that you could just use "netcat" and pipe the client data to it. Only problem then is his server might not have netcat either :)

-Charles

Larry Barber wrote:

The only binary you _really_ need is bb and I think I saw a Perl version of the BigBrother bb program on deadcat. If you were to install that you could use cron (assuming these are Unix-like machines) to run the hobbitclient.sh script every 5 minutes.

Thanks, Larry Barber

On 6/21/06, *Hubbard, Greg L* <greg.hubbard at eds.com <mailto:greg.hubbard at eds.com> > wrote:

Henrik:

I heard a rumor that Nagios has an optional client that does not
have to
be compiled.  Don't know if this is true, but it would sure help
me out
if there was a "Perl-only" or "Perl+shell" client that I could use on
the one or two systems where I cannot install all the junk needed to
compile a Hobbit client binary.  Binary Perl distributions that just
drop in are usually available...  I know there would be a performance
hit, but I would rather have a more expensive-to-run client than no
client.

Thoughts?

GLH
-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk <mailto:henrik at hswn.dk>]
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 9:33 AM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk <mailto:hobbit at hswn.dk>
Subject: Re: [hobbit] Hobbit vs Nagios

On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 09:47:47PM -0400, Matthew Davis wrote:
> I tried out nagios and one huge winning factor for Hobbit was
> simplicity.  I put quite a bit of time into getting nagios off the
> ground with little luck.  And in the same amount of time, I was able
> to get nearly all functionality I required out of a monitoring
> program.

I had a funny experience last week. There was a Linux Users group
meeting here in Copenhagen, where the subject was "Setting up Nagios".
Since I'm always interested to see what the competitors look like, I
attended. The guy who told about Nagios knew that I am behind
Hobbit, as
did a couple of the people in the audience. So when the talk about
Nagios was over and there was some spare time left, they asked me if I
could give a quick overview of Hobbit. Which I did, thanks to a
wireless
Internet connection they managed to setup quickly.

After about an hour, someone in the audience asked the Nagios guy
"after
hearing about Nagios and Hobbit tonight, why didn't you just install
Hobbit?"

I think that tells a lot about how easy it is to setup Hobbit compared
to Nagios.

On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 11:18:17AM -0500, Hubbard, Greg L wrote:

I heard a rumor that Nagios has an optional client that does not have to be compiled. Don't know if this is true, but it would sure help me out if there was a "Perl-only" or "Perl+shell" client that I could use on the one or two systems where I cannot install all the junk needed to compile a Hobbit client binary. Binary Perl distributions that just drop in are usually available... I know there would be a performance hit, but I would rather have a more expensive-to-run client than no client.

Thoughts?

The only tools you need for building a Hobbit client are a C compiler and GNU make. Period.

Combined with the fact that you can compile the client on one system, wrap it up in a tar-file and install it on all of the other systems, I really don't think this is a big issue. I've already had a couple of people offering their pre-built clients for various platforms for download, so I expect that once the 4.2 release is out, there will quickly be ready-to-run binaries available for download.

I really don't want to have two separate implementations of the same utility. Especially not one that I will not be able to maintain - I am about as good at Perl programming as the proverbial monkey.

Regards, Henrik

Since you are talking just a few systems. You could try this agentless idea that was mentioned way back.

http://www.hswn.dk/hobbiton/2006/01/msg00045.html

I just tried it on a PPC embedded linux device which has limited command functionality. The basics are working for cpu, disk, ports and procs. Procs I had to echo a fake header, but it is listing the processes and checking what should be running. And now memory. I had to re-format the output with sed. 7 of the 8 Graphs seem to work properly. I got it to do more then I expected. If I needed msgs, I probably could have found a way.

John

Hubbard, Greg L wrote:

Well, that's that.

My problem is that I have a few systems that I want to monitor that are either old, or singletons, or both. In my particular case it is and elderly one-of-a-kind system.

I understand your reluctance to maintain two source trees. If you can write C, you can write Perl, and probably run rings around most Perl hackers.

Thanks anyway!

GLH

-----Original Message----- From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk] Sent: Monday, June 26, 2006 4:12 AM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Hobbit vs Nagios

On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 11:18:17AM -0500, Hubbard, Greg L wrote:

...

I heard a rumor that Nagios has an optional client that does not have to be compiled. Don't know if this is true, but it would sure help me

...

out if there was a "Perl-only" or "Perl+shell" client that I could use

...

on the one or two systems where I cannot install all the junk needed to compile a Hobbit client binary. Binary Perl distributions that just drop in are usually available... I know there would be a performance hit, but I would rather have a more expensive-to-run client than no client.

Thoughts?

The only tools you need for building a Hobbit client are a C compiler and GNU make. Period.

Combined with the fact that you can compile the client on one system, wrap it up in a tar-file and install it on all of the other systems, I really don't think this is a big issue. I've already had a couple of people offering their pre-built clients for various platforms for download, so I expect that once the 4.2 release is out, there will quickly be ready-to-run binaries available for download.

I really don't want to have two separate implementations of the same utility. Especially not one that I will not be able to maintain - I am about as good at Perl programming as the proverbial monkey.

Regards, Henrik

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...

To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk