Nagios Vs. Big Brother

[Bill Benedetto]

>>> Brent Ryan writes:

  Brent> I know there is some obvious answers to this, but is
  Brent> there any documentation of pros/cons for these
  Brent> monitoring applications? Why is nagios better then Big
  Brent> Brother? Brent

It really depends on who you ask and how you ask it and what you
like and what your tolerance for pain is.

We've been running Big Brother for a long time here and have
grown accustomed to how it works.

We've been investigating Nagios for the past few months to see
how it works and compares to BB.

The licensing issue for Big Brother is somewhat of a pain because
it's not GPL.  Big Brother has its own license which is rather
confusing to most people.

Compared to Big Brother, Nagios is a serious pain in the butt to
configure.  Once you have your mind wrapped around the Nagios
configuration scheme, though, it's not better or worse - just
different.

The free version of Big Brother hasn't been updated in over a
year.  That's enough for some people to drop BB.  *BUT* one of
the BB community has developed a replacement for the BB server
part (AKA Hobbit) and that IS under active development so that's
a plus.  (FWIW, I haven't tried this new replacement server.)

BB doesn't have the statusmap stuff.  (There may be an add-on
that I don't know about, though.)

BB doesn't have the notion of parent-child relationships.  Again,
there may be some add-on that will do this that I don't know
about.  The aforementioned Hobbit says that it has this notion of
parent-child relationships but I haven't investigated Hobbit yet.

BB doesn't have the notion of flapping, either.

Those two features (parent-child and flapping) are big wins for
Nagios.

Nagios' web page appears to me to be overly cluttered.  It
appears that there's no place to go that I can just have Nagios
tell me "this is what's broken".  I find nothing about the Nagios
web page intuitive.  Now that I've found my way around the Nagios
web page, however, it's not as bad as I first thought.  It still
seems way over complicated though.

In fairness, BB's web page isn't overly intuitive to the
uninitiated either.  *BUT* it is a lot simpler to take in.  Big
Brother changes the background color of the web page based on the
state on that page.  So if everything is good on a particular web
page, that page's background is green.  If something on that web
page is broken, that page's background is red.  A lot of people
like that.

Both Big Brother and Nagios have good email lists comprised of a
knowledgeable, friendly community.

Again, let me couch all of these observations by saying that I've
used Big Brother for years and Nagios for months.  Big time
difference there.

- Bill
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Bill Benedetto     <bbenedetto at goodyear.com>    The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.
I don't speak for Goodyear and they don't speak for me.  We're both happy.


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