[hobbit] Hobbit vs Nagios

[Dan Vande More]

I should also mention that the basic graphing is a tremendous time
saver. The fact that almost all of it works out of the box and for
basic things like ping, disk space, etc saves a huge headache of
having to jump back and forth between mrtg/cacti and hobbit. While I
believe in the separaton of apps for most areas, this is one I'm
reluctanct to separate readily.

Cacti does my real graphing, like bandwidth/temperature and stuff, but
hobbit gives me some meat right there - no search, no wandering, no
switching tabs, just concomitant graphs and statuses.

On 5/22/06, Dan Vande More <bigdan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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> >
> >
> >
>