[hobbit] nagios vs hobbit

[Shawn Heisey]

Geoff Steer wrote:
>  Every time I have to add a new monitor or get asked to graph something,
> I keep thinking 'This would be so much easier with hobbit!'
>   
At my job, we're using two primary tools for network monitoring - Hobbit 
and OpenNMS.  Hobbit is primarily for system monitoring, and OpenNMS for 
network monitoring.  I've still got a ton of stuff to add to Hobbit, but 
the configuration is pretty much done, and took a lot less time than 
when I set up Big Brother four years ago.

OpenNMS is a whole different beast.  It's much more of a framework than 
a drop-in system, so you have to flesh out the last mile or it's not 
useful.  We used to have an ancient version of OpenView on Solaris 2.6 
set up by my predecessor.  OpenView is even more voodoo than OpenNMS, 
but their magic isn't free.  Faced with the prospect of having to learn 
how to use one or the other, I chose to use the one that runs on Linux 
and won't cost most of my yearly salary just for an upgrade to run on a 
recent version of Solaris.  There's still a ton of work to do on it.

With Hobbit, you get almost complete functionality out of the box with 
minimal configuration.  There's still more untapped power under the hood 
if you delve deeper, but you don't have to sacrifice chickens over the 
monitor at midnight to get it working.  Nagios is somewhere between 
Hobbit and a full NMS.  I haven't ever set up a Nagios system, mostly 
because when I started toying with it, it looked a lot harder than the 
Big Brother we were using at the time.

If I put enough work into OpenNMS, it would be able to replace Hobbit 
and leave it in the dust, but I don't have any reason to spend the time.