[hobbit] Hobbit newbie from BB: differences and what may I lose from migrating?

[Smith, Jim]

I have to second everything that Kent said.  I am still in the process
of switching from BB to Hobbit, but I've had it set up and running since
January.  I really, really like it.

I'm going to continue using BB for a while to send messages and alerts
to the help desk folks, since I want to filter out a lot of things that
they might panic about but aren't really critical issues.  Hobbit will
be the main monitoring system for the rest of the technical staff.

Jim Smith


-----Original Message-----
From: Brodie, Kent [mailto:brodie at mcw.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 4:37 PM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: RE: [hobbit] Hobbit newbie from BB: differences and what may I
lose from migrating?

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........................ 

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