[hobbit] Hobbit versus Unicenter/TNG

[Ralph Mitchell]

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