Most of the comments have addressed specific concerns. I will however, add my two cents worth, having just upgraded from a pure BB situation.

First off, I was never aware of Hobbit. I got introduced to it when I was playing with my BB setup at Usenix, and someone basically said "cool, but have you seen THIS?".

As soon as I got home, I fired up Hobbit on a test server, and began to play.

Here's my observations, all of which I hope you can appreciate:

• Building, installation: Much better, and cleaner than BB. In fact, the BB clients insisted you configured the local (client) bb-hosts file with "itself". Not necessary with Hobbit. Cool part: Once you get a particular client built (say, for Solaris 2.8/2.9), you can tar it up and untar it on the remote clients. Set up a hobbit user id, set up the init.d script, and voila. I had to deploy this across 140 servers. I got to the point where I could set up a new client in about a minute and 30 seconds.

• Configuration: As said, most of the stuff is configured ON THE SERVER. This is just *so* much better than BB. All of my tests, alarms, etc, are on the server. Only exception are client-based EXT scripts. I grabbed one for Oracle monitoring (bb-moracle) and it worked with hobbit just great.

• Performance: I am monitoring 140 servers from a single-processor P4 server. Barely uses any resources. The network tests work much faster than how BB handled it. My average system load is 0.2. Woooof.

• RRD: This is what sold me. The built-in trend graphs are well.... just far too cool for words. Trend graphs for cpu use.. disk... memory, etc. We had a huge ORCA installation that I trashed when I saw this.

• Remote enable, disable: Very very cool.

Yes, there's a bit of a learning curve for things like the hobbit-alerts.cfg file, or hobbit-clients.cfg file, but these come with time after playing, and we'll help you out.

Overall, since I fired this up in lieu of BB, I haven't looked back and am *VERY* impressed with what I have seen. And I used BB a lot.

And, development is active and the community is growing. The "old" BB is basically dead from what I can see.

-----Original Message----- From: Gary B. [mailto:gmbfly98 at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 3:55 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Hobbit newbie from BB: differences and what may I lose from migrating?

First, after reading through whatever I could find on the website I am still a little bit confused about configuration and setup........................