[hobbit] Hobbit versus Unicenter/TNG

[Ralph Mitchell]

On 2/7/07, Jones, Jason (Altrincham) <JasonAS_Jones at mentor.com> wrote:
> 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 :) ).

Around here, it's a question of "if it breaks, who can we blame??"
However, my recently-ex manager's attitude was "whatever it takes to
get the job done".  She asked me to work the monitoring desk for
awhile, at a time when the web checks consisted of a list of URLs to
visit twice per shift.  It didn't take many nights to get some scripts
together to feed BB, thereby saving about 1/2 head per shift and
running the checks every ten minutes.  That was back in 2000.  My old
DL380 has gone down 3 times since then - once to move it, once was a
kernel crash, once when it blew its power supply - whereas the TNG
infrastructure seems to need booting and/or reinstalling regularly.
That power supply blowout was my excuse to switch to Hobbit - I had a
working Hobbit server being fed by BB, with all the scripts almost
ready to run.

> 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.

We're an IT outsourcing company.  I'm not anywhere near the sales
side, but I've heard that prospective clients generally want to know
how we're going to monitor their stuff.  I suppose they get a nice
warm fuzzy feeling when the sales critter tells them about the
multi-million-dollar monitoring solutions we have available.  Telling
a customer the monitor is free and light enough to run on a 486
w/FreeBSD just isn't going to win contracts... :)  The word slowly
seeps out, though.  BB, and now Hobbit, regularly catches things that
TNG doesn't see, including excessive cpu use in some TNG boxes - yep,
I'm running snmpwalk against some TNG infrastructure and feeding
Hobbit the results.  Seems like TNG isn't so hot at watching itself
for some reason...

Ralph Mitchell