[hobbit] Hobbit vs Nagios

[Dan Vande More]

IIRC, nagios doesn't support string matching like looking for 250 on
an smtp connection, or a 200/301 on an http connection without a
special plugin - it merely checks to see if the port responds. This is
one of hobbit's greatest strengths and one of the reasons I chose it.

Also, I believe, though it's just an opinion, that hobbit/bb's client
configuration is much more "standardized" (for lack of better term).
It's far more likely that I can take a hobbit client and move it to an
entirely different system and it would work with very little
configuration. The same did not seem to hold true for nagios. In fact,
I remember downloading nagios extensions from the share site and
"porting" them to my servers. IOW, the bb client knew where grep was,
where top was, etc. Nagios does not.

Nagios also cannot send you more than the first line of text on a
notifcation. A huge problem for me. When I'm out and I get a page, I
want to see the whole message so I can decide whether to up the
priority and get to a computer, or ignore it because it was a some
transient error.

Built in configurability is important. The fact that hobbit can almost
instantly and natively work with https,pop3s, imaps, ldapssl is great.
The flexibility in dns libraries is nice for troubleshooting. And on,
and on...

The nagios page always seemed heavy and was uncomfortably large to
download from a pda while out. It was also impossible to navigate.
While hobbit isn't made to work with pdas with little resolution, it
actually works really well.

I'm not going to argue that either is faster, I do know that hobbit is
very, very fast and I know this as well as security are among the top
priorities for Henrik and since they match my priorities well, it was
no contest.

Henrik also seems to take the "Do it right" approach which I like too.
Instead of kludging code together to put in some haphazard feature, he
actually seems to take a deep breath and think about things before
implementing them. This means once something is in hobbit you know
it's been pretty well thought through and will probably remain
relatively stable and will not be a drag on the code later.

Additionally, I like how patches/bugs can be submitted and Henrik
fixes them usually almost immediately. While it might seem to not be a
big deal because it's just a simple thing he missed, it adds an
enormous amount of credence to the project.

Finally, not to say nagios code is not cleanly, but hobbit's code is
very easy to read, understand and work on from my point of view.

Dan




On 5/22/06, T.J. Yang <tj_yang at hotmail.com> wrote:
> <snip>
> >As much as I dont want to move away from Hobbit/Big Brother I have been
> >asked to compare Hobbit to Nagios. I would imagine quite a number of people
> >on this list have experienced many of the offerings out theere before
> >changing to hobbit or using a combination of products.
> >
> >I've done a quick google and there is a bit of stuff out there but
> >obviously the more the merrier.
> >
> >So yeah pros cons from all aspects would be quite welcome and perhaps the
> >results could be stuck up on the Wiki somewhere
> >
>
> if someone are willing to contribute the comparison efforts.
> How about here ?
>
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/System_Monitoring_with_Hobbit/User_Guide#System_Monitoring_Software_Comparison
>
>
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