Geoff Steer wrote:
At my job, we're using two primary tools for network monitoring - Hobbit and OpenNMS. Hobbit is primarily for system monitoring, and OpenNMS for network monitoring. I've still got a ton of stuff to add to Hobbit, but the configuration is pretty much done, and took a lot less time than when I set up Big Brother four years ago.Every time I have to add a new monitor or get asked to graph something, I keep thinking 'This would be so much easier with hobbit!'
OpenNMS is a whole different beast. It's much more of a framework than a drop-in system, so you have to flesh out the last mile or it's not useful. We used to have an ancient version of OpenView on Solaris 2.6 set up by my predecessor. OpenView is even more voodoo than OpenNMS, but their magic isn't free. Faced with the prospect of having to learn how to use one or the other, I chose to use the one that runs on Linux and won't cost most of my yearly salary just for an upgrade to run on a recent version of Solaris. There's still a ton of work to do on it.
With Hobbit, you get almost complete functionality out of the box with minimal configuration. There's still more untapped power under the hood if you delve deeper, but you don't have to sacrifice chickens over the monitor at midnight to get it working. Nagios is somewhere between Hobbit and a full NMS. I haven't ever set up a Nagios system, mostly because when I started toying with it, it looked a lot harder than the Big Brother we were using at the time.
If I put enough work into OpenNMS, it would be able to replace Hobbit and leave it in the dust, but I don't have any reason to spend the time.