[hobbit] Hobbit newbie from BB: differences and what may Ilose from migratin

[T.J. Yang]

Yea, FAQ is better place for this email thread. Put it on  offical hobbit 
website is fine but before that  happen I am putting it on hobbit wiki page 
to keep this email.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/System_Monitoring_with_Hobbit/FAQ#User_FAQ

tj
>From: Jordan Mendler <jmendler at ucla.edu>
>Reply-To: hobbit at hswn.dk
>To: hobbit at hswn.dk
>Subject: RE: [hobbit] Hobbit newbie from BB: differences and what may Ilose 
>from migrating?
>Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2006 08:09:29 -0700
>
>I was thinking the same thing. To add some it to the FAQ or other parts
>of the website.
>
>On Wed, 2006-08-02 at 07:37 -0400, Camp, Neil D. (ManTech) CTR wrote:
> > This is an awesome write up. Maybe you should consider adding it to your
> > webpage?
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk]
> > Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 5:13 PM
> > To: hobbit at hswn.dk
> > Subject: Re: [hobbit] Hobbit newbie from BB: differences and what may I
> > lose from migrating?
> >
> > 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#Wh
> > o_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
> >
> >
> > To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to
> > hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
> >
> >
> >
> > To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to
> > hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
> >
> >
>
>
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