Comparison of Big Brother and Nagios

[Scot L. Harris]

First I want to say I am not advocating either Nagios or Big Brother.  I
have setup both so have a little experience with each of these
packages.  I believe they have released a couple of  major updates
recently as well.  



On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 12:47, Paul L. Allen wrote:
> 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. 
> 

Actually there is a maint.pl add on that does just this.  Permits you to
disable checks per service on a system.




> > 	- 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? 

Not real sure about this one.  There are a lot of add ons that permit
Big Brother to monitor pretty much anything available.  Including add
ons to produce maps and larrd graphs for the PHB.  :)

One major add on that any BB system should use is the bbgen add on.  It
improves performance significantly.  Given the opportunity I would
actually consider using both Big Brother as well as something like
nagios.  While both can do similar jobs in some ways they can complement
each other.  

Having said that, I would think a comparison between nagios and openNMS
would be more appropriate.  Although with openNMS you need to use an
older version of the java SDK which still has the garbage collection
enabled.  ;p




-- 
Scot L. Harris <webid at cfl.rr.com>



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