On 2/7/07, Jones, Jason (Altrincham) <user-ee957b46acd2@xymon.invalid> 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