Re: [hobbit] Informal survey about commercial support for Hobbit

["Ralph Mitchell" <ralphmitchell (at) gmail.com>]

On 9/22/06, T.J. Yang <tj_yang (at) hotmail.com> wrote:
> I really like to see how Hobbit compare to Tivoli,CA .. enterprise class
> systems.
> Management would like to see unbiased review of monitoring systems.

Well, I can't really give you an unbiased view of CA, but I can tell
you that as of the last time I looked (about 2 years ago), Unicenter's
Web Monitoring Option (WMO) sucked big time.  I wrote up a long email
rant fairly recently for a co-worker, which I won't repeat here, but
just to hit some highlights:

o The WMO agent crashes if you "click the icons too fast" - that's
actual word-for-word from CA themselves.

o If any checks are disabled, they automatically get re-enabled when
the agent starts up.  See above point...

o The reports show up on the Event Console with the nodename of the
machine running the check, *not* the nodename with the problem.

o The checks are written in a sort of XML format, and the builtin
editor is nasty.

o The check can execute an external program, but there's no way to
pick up any output from it.  I needed that, obviously...

OK, I'll stop there before my blood pressure gets any higher.

The above was enough justification for my manager to scrap the "switch
from Big Brother to WMO at all costs" plan.  So I'm still happily
banging out Bourne shell scripts that use curl to grab web pages, with
the reports being delivered to Hobbit.

Ralph Mitchell