[hobbit] Hobbit versus Unicenter/TNG

[PAUL WILLIAMSON]

>>> ralphmitchell at gmail.com 02/07/07 9:50 AM >>>
> On 2/7/07, Henrik Stoerner <henrik at hswn.dk> wrote:
> > I'm currently arguing with some PHB's who insist that Unicenter/TNG

> > is the "standard" monitoring tool and we're supposed to use that
> > exclusively.
> >
> > Since I have the users on my side I do expect to win that struggle,

> > but if any of you have compared Hobbit with Unicenter/TNG I 
> > would be interested to hear about it. Especially features you've 
> > found that Hobbit has, but TNG doesn't. I know of quite a few, 
> > but any ammunition is welcome.
> 
> Last time I looked at TNG's Web Monitoring Option, it sucked big
time.

Still does, at least as recent as about 6 months ago.

TNG's reporting capabilities are horrible.  

> Possibly the biggest point in Hobbit's favour around here is that 
> you can access it through a web browser - any web browser 
> on any OS.  I don't think TNG has that option, unless it was 
> recently added.  If I'm at home and get a call about it, I can 
> VPN to the company network, pop up a browser and take a 
> look.  I don't have to have about 100Mb of TNG installed to 
> be able to view the pages.

Yep!! Light on the server side and light on the client side.  
TNG/Unicernter is unbelievably gigantic, enourmous, and otherwise 
unecessarily complex.  It takes a team of engineers and more than a 
few servers to get even close to some of the functionality and 
usefulness of Hobbit.

>  I don't know about the recent versions of TNG, but back in 1998
> TNG-2.1 (2.0 maybe?) took around 40 minutes to bring up the 2D 
> map.

It only takes about 20 minutes now, and it defaults back to the 
view it wants to show you every time.

> I only have Hobbit's client-side running on a few of my own servers,
> because my own PHBs have decreed that TNG is the only monitoring 
> tool to use.  Oh, and NetCool.  Oh, and BMC Patrol  Oh, and 
> HPOpenView.  Oh, and Mercury.  Oh, and OnCentauri...
>
> Ralph Mitchell

Funny that should come up.  We've gotten BB (and slowly introducing 
Hobbit) and Netcool very well integrated.  It makes the PHBs happy, 
both because they don't have to spend tons of cash to replicate 
BB/Hobbit, and they get their golf outings and other unnamed perks 
paid for by the vendors.

I know at a previous job, I was told the only reason we went with 
software from vendor X rather than vendor Y is because vendor X 
could get us tickets to every home Baltimore Orioles game.  I couldn't

believe someone was willing to actually say that.

Paul