nagios versus big brother - opinions please.

[Tom Diehl]

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, Broun, Bevan wrote:

> Hi all
> 
> We have both nagios and big brother doing monitoring here. The big brother
> installation is handled by our applications team while the nagios
> installations is handled by the infrastructure team. The is a bit of
> friction between the teams. We are now at the point where nagios is
> installed on many servers, big brother on fewer and the applications team
> wants bb installed on some servers where nagios already is. My role is as
> one of two infrastructure architects to whom decision making on this sort
> of stuff is given (which is not that much fun - trying to keep everybody
> happy).
> 
> I'm no expert in either product but favor nagios as purely on a licensing
> basis. BB is free for internal, costs if you start to monitor external.
> Nagios, as you all know, is GP.
> 
> BB seems to have a slicker interface, but this is of only little
> importance.
> 
> Please send any strong technical arguments in favor of one system or the
> other.

This is like asking which is better vi or emacs. It is basically a religious
argument. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. If you ask this question
on the BB list you will get different answers. As you said above bb has a MUCH
nicer interface and whether or not it is important to you may or may not matter
in the overall scheme of things, but it might matter to some PHB. Having used
both for some period of time side by side I find the nagios display difficult
to get the same info that I can get out of bb in under 2 seconds. Nagios OTOH
is as you say GPL which is one of the reasons I am using it. BB is much easier
to setup, both have a plethora of plugins for just about anything imaginable.
I personally think that nagios might scale better but since my installation
is relatively small I am not sure. One thing for sure BB does that nagios does
not appear to be able to do without a lot of monkey motion is sanely monitor
hosts that it is normal for them to occasionally be disconnected, such as
printers or systems connected by a dialup modem. BB has a switch you add in
the config file and magic when the host goes away you get no notifications.
When it comes back it will automagically notify you if a service is down but
the host is up. Good luck getting that to work EASILY with nagios. Notice
I did not say it could not be done but as best as I can tell it is way more
involved than just adding the word dialup to a config file. As I said
each has its advantages and disadvantages. I suspect that here mostly what
you will get is how great nagios is and how poor BB is. If that is what you
want you are most likely in the right place. ;)

BTW, if you check the archives you will see this question was asked and answered
within the last few weeks.

Just my $.02. I am sure others will chime in once again with their opinions
also.

Tom


-------------------------------------------------------
SF.Net is sponsored by: Speed Start Your Linux Apps Now.
Build and deploy apps & Web services for Linux with
a free DVD software kit from IBM. Click Now!
http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1356&alloc_id=3438&op=click
_______________________________________________
Nagios-users mailing list
Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users
::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. 
::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null