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

[Jordan Mendler]

Awesome guys, no doubt I am gonna try it out when I get some free time.
I think the fact that I got all my questions answered a few different
times in a very short period says something about the community.

So if I use the existing BB clients with a new Hobbit server, what
functionally will be lost until I have a chance to upgrade all the
clients to hobbit?

Thanks so much,
Jordan

On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 23:12 +0200, Henrik Stoerner wrote:
> Hi Jordan,
> 
> I'll try to answer your questions. Since I also develop Hobbit I am
> probably slightly biased when it comes to the "is-this-more-difficult-
> to-do-than-with-BB" type of questions, but I am sure others will
> voice their opinions on that.
> 
> On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 12:36:29PM -0700, Jordan Mendler wrote:
> > 
> > First, after reading through whatever I could find on the website I am
> > still a little bit confused about configuration and setup. With BB, you
> > install and configure each client and server on the local machine,
> > except for the universal bb-hosts. Is this the same on Hobbit, or does
> > Hobbit use a central configuration file that is modified only on the
> > server to configure clients? I am trying to figure out the difference
> > between installing, maintaining and configuring BB and Hobbit setups.
> 
> First, let me stress that Hobbit is fully compatible with your existing
> BB clients. You can keep your current client setup and just switch to
> Hobbit on the server side, and all of your clients will continue to 
> work as they do with BB as the server. So you can migrate the server
> side first, and then migrate clients when you find that it is convenient
> to do so - or you want to take advantage of some of the new stuff that
> is in Hobbit.
> 
> The Hobbit client configuration is maintained on the Hobbit server. 
> Clients in Hobbit are designed to be *really* dumb; they just collect
> data, and all of the configuration of what to monitor, what thresholds
> to use for e.g. disk utilisation and so on is configured only on the
> Hobbit server.
> 
> This is a major difference between Hobbit and BB. With BB you have
> delegated the client administration to whoever manages each server.
> Hobbit centralizes the monitoring configuration, so you will probably
> have a group of people who take more control of the monitoring setup.
> 
> > Hobbit looks alot more complex to setup, but once I get my feet wet is
> > it any harder than BB?
> 
> I think it is easier, once you get used to the Hobbit way of doing
> things. But as I said, I am biased.
> 
> > Second is performance. I know this list may be biased toward Hobbit, but
> > is it actually faster? We have about 50-100 clients on BB and I did not
> > notice any performance issues.
> 
> With that number of systems monitored, you probably will not see a huge
> difference. BB works quite well for a small number of systems, but when
> you move beyond a couple of hundred boxes the overhead of generating 
> webpages through shell scripts becomes very noticeable. On my setup,
> the servers were simply choking on the disk I/O caused by BB saving
> every status in a separate file, and from the huge number of small
> cut-grep-awk-sed etc. commands that ran to generate webpages.
> 
> > Hobbit looks like it is very complex, so does this mean it uses a lot 
> > of resources on the client and server? What speed/ram server is usually 
> > the minimum recommended for a dedicated Hobbit server? Would something 
> > like a dual Pentium II 266mhz have any performance issues as a server, 
> > if it does nothing else? What about for clients? We have still have 
> > some testing, stating and production servers left that are singe chip 
> > Pentium III 700-850 mhz, and even a couple Pentium II's. Just need to 
> > make sure all the resources used for things like graphs are taken from 
> > the server and not each client.
> 
> The Hobbit server uses fewer ressources than the BB server. The main
> ressource usage is memory; Hobbit keeps everything in memory except 
> the history logs and the RRD files used for graphs. That doesn't mean
> a whole lot, though: Here's a ps listing of the Hobbit processes running 
> on my main monitoring system - it handles about 2500 hosts:
> 
> $ ps vax|cut -c1-100|egrep "PID|hobbit"
>   PID TTY      STAT   TIME  MAJFL   TRS   DRS  RSS %MEM COMMAND
>   732 ?        Ss     1:24      0   101  1802  696  0.0 hobbitlaunch
>   735 ?        S    2434:37     1   162 31357 29784  2.8 hobbitd
>  1470 ?        S     14:50      0    99  2332 1088  0.1 hobbitd_channel --channel=stachg
>  1471 ?        S     25:18      0   108  2515 1048  0.1 hobbitd_history
>  1472 ?        S    964:26      0    99  2332 1264  0.1 hobbitd_channel --channel=page
>  1473 ?        S    1227:34     0   154  5661 3912  0.3 hobbitd_alert
>  1474 ?        S    4090:05     0    99  2332 1264  0.1 hobbitd_channel --channel=status
>  1475 ?        D    2962:15     0   178  7381 4392  0.4 hobbitd_rrd
>  1476 ?        S    259:55      0    99  2332 1208  0.1 hobbitd_channel --channel=data
>  1477 ?        S    494:13      0   178  5141 2128  0.2 hobbitd_rrd
>  1478 ?        S    126:20      0    99  2844 1832  0.1 hobbitd_channel --channel=client
>  1480 ?        S    291:20      0   146  4485 2792  0.2 hobbitd_client
>  5552 ?        S      0:00      0   669  2002 1352  0.1 sh -c vmstat 300 2 1>/usr/lib/hobbit/client/
> 
> As you can see, the biggest chunk of memory goes to the "hobbitd"
> process which is the one that keeps all state information. It's
> currently using some 31 MB of memory. (This box has 1 GB RAM).
> 
> A rough estimate of how much memory Hobbit needs would be the size of
> your bbvar/logs/ directory, plus 30 MB.
> 
> As for CPU usage, your PII/266 should be adequate for 50-100 servers.
> The box I'm running on is an old (7-8 years) Solaris server with a 
> 900 MHz UltraSparc II processor. That's roughly comparable to a PII
> running at 1.2 GHz. And it handles 25 times as many hosts as you are
> aiming for.
> 
> > Third is plugins. Are BB plugins compatible with Hobbit?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> > Also how hard are plugins to write for Hobbit? 
> 
> Plugins that run on the monitored client systems are as easy to write
> as for BB, since it is basically the same thing.
> 
> Hobbit also allows you to write plugins for the Hobbit server, which
> receive events from the Hobbit server daemon. This is used by the 
> core Hobbit tools - e.g. the hobbitd_rrd processes you see in the
> ps-listing above are a plugin that handle updating of the RRD files
> from the status- and data-messages that are sent to Hobbit. There
> aren't any third-party plugins that use this yet (at least, I 
> don't know of any), but writing them is fairly simple since it 
> basically involves reading data from a pipe and processing it in
> whatever way you want.
> 
> > I don't know if these even exist for
> > bb, but I ultimately would like to integrate plugins that 1) monitor
> > legato tape backup, 
> 
> Dont know about this.
> 
> > 2) run nmap to see what ports are open/can be seen from an external 
> > machine, 
> 
> The Hobbit client in version 4.2 (about to be released soon) reports
> details about the network services running on a host. So you can check
> for which ports are open/listening for connections, and trigger alerts
> if any unwanted ports show up.
> 
> > 3) run 'lshw -html' to show a list of all the hardware on the system, 
> 
> This would typically be a client-side test.
> 
> > 4) monitor uptime, 
> 
> This is standard.
> 
> > 5) monitor OS and kernel versions (uname -a and head -n 1 /etc/issue), 
> 
> This data is collected by the Hobbit client.
> 
> > 6) maybe some more router/network monitoring stuff and 
> 
> Hobbit comes with built-in network service monitoring. There is also
> an SNMP add-on which can be used for monitoring devices such as routers.
> 
> > Fourth is relay. By this I mean monitoring systems on a private
> > subnetwork that are only accessible to the Hobbit server by going
> > through an intermediate server. Is this possible with Hobbit and is it
> > any more difficult to do than on BB?
> 
> Two ways of doing that. First, there is a proxy utility which is used
> to forward Hobbit messages from one network to another. This is used if
> your client systems on the private subnet are allowed to make outgoing
> connections to the proxy, and the proxy can connect to the real Hobbit
> server.
> 
> Second, Hobbit 4.2 includes a set of tools where it's the server that
> contacts clients to pick up the data they have collected (i.e. the
> traffic is initiated by the server, where the normal BB setup is for 
> the client to initiate the connection). Useful for DMZ style setups
> where clients are not allowed to generate outbound connections.
> 
> > Fifth is portability. BB is very portable, I can make a 'model' client
> > for say Red Hat and tar it and distribute it very easily to every server
> > I have using only a few commands. Is Hobbit the same, or are there
> > client dependencies or other things that may make this more difficult.
> 
> The Hobbit client uses only the system libraries and standard utilities 
> found on your client systems. You will need at least one system where
> you can compile the client binaries (that's similar to the BB
> requirements), since a few of the client-side tools are written in C.
> 
> Once you have a client compiled for an OS, it is as portable as any
> binary that is dynamically linked on your platform. I.e. you can 
> just copy it over as long as the same run-time libraries are available.
> 
> So far, we haven't managed to find any unix-like system that couldn't
> run the Hobbit client. Including some rather odd ones. The current list
> of client-side data collectors are
> 
> hobbitclient-aix.sh    hobbitclient-darwin.sh  hobbitclient-freebsd.sh
> hobbitclient-hp-ux.sh  hobbitclient-irix.sh    hobbitclient-linux.sh
> hobbitclient-netbsd.sh hobbitclient-openbsd.sh hobbitclient-osf1.sh
> hobbitclient-sunos.sh
> 
> > Sixth is development. How active is the development of Hobbit, how big
> > is the community, etc? How many people can attest to having fully
> > functional hobbit setups, how long has it been around and how often are
> > new releases usually made? 
> 
> Hobbit started back in late 2002 when it was called the "bbgen toolkit".
> It was renamed to Hobbit in March 2005 when it had developed into a 
> complete replacement for BB. More details in the hobbit(7) man-page
> available online at http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit/help/manpages/
> 
> It is actively being developed by me, but people on this list have
> made contributions of code. Some have picked up special projects
> like the Windows client and run that completely on their own.
> I'd say Hobbit currently has a very active user community, and
> the development community is slowly growing beyond just myself.
> 
> There are currently 433 subscribers to the Hobbit mailing list.
> According to the Sourceforge download statistics, it is downloaded
> about 1000 times per month.
> http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=128058&ugn=hobbitmon&type=&mode=year
> 
> There was a thread on the mailing list back in May about who uses
> Hobbit. The results were summarized here:
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/System_Monitoring_with_Hobbit/User_Guide#Who_use_Hobbit_.3F
> 
> New releases have usually happened frequently - 2-4 times a year.
> The current interval between the 4.1.2 release and version 4.2 is 
> unusually long - a whole year. I don't expect that to happen again.
> 
> 
> > Also I saw something this morning about a Windows client -- how 
> > stable is that? 
> 
> >From what I hear it should be usable. But you can stick with the
> current BBNT client until it reaches version 1.0.
> 
> > How stable is the Solaris version?
> 
> Rock-solid.
> 
> 
> > Is there a client for Mac OSX? 
> 
> Yes. It will run the Hobbit server also, if you want to.
> 
> 
> > Is Hobbit like BB in the sense that you can change paths to system 
> > binaries like grep and sed to allow easy use on other UNIXes like OSX? 
> 
> Adding a client for a new OS will require implementing both a
> client-side script to collect whatever data is interesting for this
> system, and implementing the data parsing on the Hobbit server-side.
> So it is somewhat more challenging. But since Hobbit already supports
> all of the common Unix systems, I doubt that you will need to worry 
> about that. If you do have a system which is not on the list, I will
> help you with adding support for it.
> 
> 
> > When will 4.2 be officially released as a production version? 
> 
> Probably by the end of this week.
> 
> 
> > Since we have a working BB setup for now, I need to
> > decide if I should try to start migrating now or if I should wait some
> > time for Hobbit to develop more before I migrate from BB.
> 
> I don't think you have to wait. But it's for You to decide.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Henrik
> 
> 
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