Comparison of Big Brother and Nagios

[Paul L. Allen]

markwag+nagios at u.washington.edu writes: 

> - BB: No scheduled downtime.

Worse than that, no web interface to allow us or clients to disable checks
or for us to add notes.  In fact, any time you want to temporarily
disable a host or service check you have to do some editing of files.
I happen to prefer editing files to using web interfaces, but not when
the web interface allows the client to make changes instead of me having
to. 

> 	- Cannot be broken down into groups.

There is a facility for grouping machines on a separate page and report
the health of that whole group on the main page. 

> - BB: Why so many forks? Little sister, etc.

Either my configuration has a problem or the same is true of nagios. 

The one thing in BB's favour is a simple health report that is easier
to interpret from some distance away.  A big point in Nagios's favour
is the wealth of PHB features, displaying the informtion in different
levels of detail and even the (technically of little use but something
PHBs love) status map and 3D status map - we sell monitoring services
to clients who love stuff like that.  Which reminds me - I don't think
you can set up BB to restrict users to only seeing their own machines
rather than everyone's, making it hard to set up a centralized service
for multiple independent clients. 

Add in the fact that Nagios can monitor many more services than
BB and I think you have a clear winner.  Check_hplj is great fun
(phone the client and tell them to put more paper in their printer)
and the new check_smart promises to be even more fun ("looks like
your hard disk is on the point of failing").  Does BB have the ability
to monitor printer status and disk drive health?  Is it ever likely to? 

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support 




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