Suitability for bb replacement in large enterprise

Joe Sloan joe at tmsusa.com
Sat Dec 6 22:25:34 CET 2008


Hello list,

I learned about hobbit a couple years back, and I've been using it in 
some small shops, but I'm hoping to be able to deploy it for my main 
employer.

At my day job, we've been using the old big brother 1.9e plus bbgen-3.5 
to monitor hundreds of unix and windows servers spread across 2 data 
centers. Id like to move to hobbit, but it is important that it be able 
to do what bb does. For the most part it is better than bb, but I have 2 
specific areas of concern:

1. snmp traps: Our netcool ticketing system relies on snmp traps from 
big brother whenever there is a significant event.

Are any xymon users currently using snmp traps in a similar sort of way?

2. alerting failover: We currently have active-active monitoring of all 
our systems. That is, the bb servers in both data centers redundantly 
monitor all the servers, but it would be a nuisance to get 2 pages for 
every event, so we use the bb failover setup so that normally only the 
bb server in data center "A" sends alerts, but if the bb server in data 
center "B" can't reach the bb server in data center "A", then it goes 
into failover mode and sends the alerts on behalf of the unreachable bb 
server in data center "A". The worst case would be some sort of split 
brain where we get 2 alerts, but we have not seen that scenario arise, 
and it works well.

Is xymon 4.2.2 capable of this sort of failover behavior?

I'm hoping to replace bb with xymon, but these 2 items are deal breakers.

Thanks in advance for your words of wisdom,

Joe







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