I'm currently arguing with some PHB's who insist that Unicenter/TNG is the "standard" monitoring tool and we're supposed to use that exclusively.
Since I have the users on my side I do expect to win that struggle, but if any of you have compared Hobbit with Unicenter/TNG I would be interested to hear about it. Especially features you've found that Hobbit has, but TNG doesn't. I know of quite a few, but any ammunition is welcome.
If you prefer, contact me directly instead of through the list.
Regards, Henrik
On 2/7/07, Henrik Stoerner <henrik at hswn.dk> wrote:
I'm currently arguing with some PHB's who insist that Unicenter/TNG is the "standard" monitoring tool and we're supposed to use that exclusively.
Since I have the users on my side I do expect to win that struggle, but if any of you have compared Hobbit with Unicenter/TNG I would be interested to hear about it. Especially features you've found that Hobbit has, but TNG doesn't. I know of quite a few, but any ammunition is welcome.
Last time I looked at TNG's Web Monitoring Option, it sucked big time. The agent would crash if you clicked the icons in the agent view too quickly; when restarted, the agent would automatically re-enable all disabled checks; in the Event Console, the reports would all be labelled with the agent's nodename instead of the nodename that had the problem. I could go on...
I have a bunch of shell scripts that monitor a variety of web pages - several airlines, travel companies, etc. I'm using Hobbit for displaying the results, because TNG just doesn't have the same capabilities. I can insert bits of web pages into the reports, links for manual checks, and so on. The monitoring folks then click through the red/yellow dot to see what I found that was bad or missing, then click through the link to try it for themselves before waking people up. While it might be possible to configure TNG to show the messages, at present it wouldn't show a url as a clickable link.
Possibly the biggest point in Hobbit's favour around here is that you can access it through a web browser - any web browser on any OS. I don't think TNG has that option, unless it was recently added. If I'm at home and get a call about it, I can VPN to the company network, pop up a browser and take a look. I don't have to have about 100Mb of TNG installed to be able to view the pages.
I don't know about the recent versions of TNG, but back in 1998 TNG-2.1 (2.0 maybe?) took around 40 minutes to bring up the 2D map.
I'm running Hobbit in RedHat 7.2 on a single-cpu 733MHz DL380, picking up about 2500 reports on 650 hosts. I doubt TNG could manage that. I only have Hobbit's client-side running on a few of my own servers, because my own PHBs have decreed that TNG is the only monitoring tool to use. Oh, and NetCool. Oh, and BMC Patrol Oh, and HPOpenView. Oh, and Mercury. Oh, and OnCentauri...
Ralph Mitchell
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 :) ).
The point is that now my company is adopting hobbit as part of the global monitoring project because it is so extendable, efficient and easy to use and while it is not expected to be used in North America it will be used on all other sites (well...eventually) so what started as a 6 site rebellion is fast becoming a global standard across ~20-30 sites.
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.
Jason.
-----Original Message----- From: Ralph Mitchell [mailto:ralphmitchell at gmail.com] Sent: 07 February 2007 14:51 To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Hobbit versus Unicenter/TNG
On 2/7/07, Henrik Stoerner <henrik at hswn.dk> wrote:
I'm currently arguing with some PHB's who insist that Unicenter/TNG is the "standard" monitoring tool and we're supposed to use that exclusively.
Since I have the users on my side I do expect to win that struggle, but if any of you have compared Hobbit with Unicenter/TNG I would be interested to hear about it. Especially features you've found that Hobbit has, but TNG doesn't. I know of quite a few, but any ammunition is welcome.
Last time I looked at TNG's Web Monitoring Option, it sucked big time. The agent would crash if you clicked the icons in the agent view too quickly; when restarted, the agent would automatically re-enable all disabled checks; in the Event Console, the reports would all be labelled with the agent's nodename instead of the nodename that had the problem. I could go on...
I have a bunch of shell scripts that monitor a variety of web pages - several airlines, travel companies, etc. I'm using Hobbit for displaying the results, because TNG just doesn't have the same capabilities. I can insert bits of web pages into the reports, links for manual checks, and so on. The monitoring folks then click through the red/yellow dot to see what I found that was bad or missing, then click through the link to try it for themselves before waking people up. While it might be possible to configure TNG to show the messages, at present it wouldn't show a url as a clickable link.
Possibly the biggest point in Hobbit's favour around here is that you can access it through a web browser - any web browser on any OS. I don't think TNG has that option, unless it was recently added. If I'm at home and get a call about it, I can VPN to the company network, pop up a browser and take a look. I don't have to have about 100Mb of TNG installed to be able to view the pages.
I don't know about the recent versions of TNG, but back in 1998 TNG-2.1 (2.0 maybe?) took around 40 minutes to bring up the 2D map.
I'm running Hobbit in RedHat 7.2 on a single-cpu 733MHz DL380, picking up about 2500 reports on 650 hosts. I doubt TNG could manage that. I only have Hobbit's client-side running on a few of my own servers, because my own PHBs have decreed that TNG is the only monitoring tool to use. Oh, and NetCool. Oh, and BMC Patrol Oh, and HPOpenView. Oh, and Mercury. Oh, and OnCentauri...
Ralph Mitchell
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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
participants (3)
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henrik＠hswn.dk
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JasonAS_Jones＠mentor.com
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ralphmitchell＠gmail.com