[hobbit] Hobbit versus Unicenter/TNG

[Jones, Jason (Altrincham)]

Why does it seem that all hobbit administrators are instantly rebelling?
Our monitoring solutions are supposed to be Nagios and Big Brother, they
are what the corporate gurus sitting on their chair decree and what
we...ignore.  I digress, but the point is that my predecessor did some
research into various monitoring solutions (and while I don't have his
notes) he chose hobbit because of the community, Henrik's willingness to
lend a hand when needed and of course it's free (an easy way to make a
manager sign-off on it :) ).

The point is that now my company is adopting hobbit as part of the
global monitoring project because it is so extendable, efficient and
easy to use and while it is not expected to be used in North America it
will be used on all other sites (well...eventually) so what started as a
6 site rebellion is fast becoming a global standard across ~20-30 sites.

One other thing I am confused about is that companies invariably benefit
from expertise in their company, especially when using a utility such as
hobbit - which is why I was afforded the luxury of reading through some
of the hobbit man-pages when I first started, so ask yourself this who
knows more about a program than the person who programmed it?!? So
surely your company benefits a lot more from your input/expertise than
mine, and mine has helped a great deal, or so I am told.

Jason.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ralph Mitchell [mailto:ralphmitchell at gmail.com] 
Sent: 07 February 2007 14:51
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: Re: [hobbit] Hobbit versus Unicenter/TNG

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.
 The agent would crash if you clicked the icons in the agent view too
quickly; when restarted, the agent would automatically re-enable all
disabled checks; in the Event Console, the reports would all be
labelled with the agent's nodename instead of the nodename that had
the problem.  I could go on...

I have a bunch of shell scripts that monitor a variety of web pages -
several airlines, travel companies, etc.  I'm using Hobbit for
displaying the results, because TNG just doesn't have the same
capabilities.  I can insert bits of web pages into the reports, links
for manual checks, and so on.  The monitoring folks then click through
the red/yellow dot to see what I found that was bad or missing, then
click through the link to try it for themselves before waking people
up.  While it might be possible to configure TNG to show the messages,
at present it wouldn't show a url as a clickable link.

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.

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.

I'm running Hobbit in RedHat 7.2 on a single-cpu 733MHz DL380, picking
up about 2500 reports on 650 hosts.  I doubt TNG could manage that.  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

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