Comparison of Big Brother and Nagios

[Tom Diehl]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 markwag+nagios at u.washington.edu wrote:

> On 19 January 2004 at 18:30, "Tom Welsh" <twelsh at square-box.com> wrote:
> 
> > Has anyone got a comparison report between Nagios and Big brother? It
> > would save me a lot of time if I could get it from some one and update /
> > plagiarize your efforts so far. 
> > 
> > I have a client who wants such a comparison and I know I have seen it
> > around somewhere before but cant find it now. I will post the doc when I
> > have finished with it to Ethan for possible dissemination on the
> > propaganda page.
> 
> You need to verify these facts. BB may have improved since last I looked.
> Here is what I came up with when evaluating both:
> 
> - BB: No scheduled downtime.

Not true. bb-maint.pl will do this quite nicely.

> - BB: Simplistic reporting.
> 
> 	- Only get trends, alert history, and availability.
> 
> 	- Cannot be broken down into groups.
> 
> - BB: Configuration.
> 
> 	- No template-based configuration.

don't need it. Config of bb is MUCH simpler than Nagios.

> - BB: Agent-based monitoring.
> 
> 	- Need to install software on every host.
> 
> 	- Uses own protocol rather than SNMP.

Can use both.

> 	- Nagios is agentless and agent-based.
> 
> - BB: Acks, but no comments.

Not true. The ack page has a place for comments.

> - BB: Limited web interface compared to Nagios.

I would argue that the Nagios user interface is waaaaaaay to busy.
I like the bb interface a lot better for the quick glance kind of thing.
Without having to do anything other than look at the screen I can tell
what the overall health of the network is and which services/hosts if any have
problems. With Nagios I have to drill down through things to tell which
services actually have a problem. It is also difficult to tell just how long a 
service/host has had a problem. Yes the information is there but it is
a lot harder to find than with bb.

> - BB: "Better Than Free" license. Must pay for non-commercial use.
> - Nagios: GP.

This IMO is the big drawback of bb. It was OK before they were acquired by
quest, but since the acquisition there has been very little support for the
BTF version of bb. I understand why this is but I do not have to like it.
I used bb for a long time but I am now looking at other solutions like
Nagios. I have had Nagios running for several months and for the most part
it works well.

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

Because different people want different things and bb's license does not
allow it to be modified and redistributed.

> - Nagios: Easily extensible. Look at the the add-ons.

This applies to bb as well. Look at deadcat.net for info.

> - BB: Support through one company.
> - Nagios: support from many companies.
> 
> - Nagios: Alas, a low signal-to-noise ratio on mailing list.
> 
> - BB: can't spell "advertise" properly on home page. :)

Are you sure?? bb is in Canada. I am not sure what the correct
Canadian spelling of it is.

HTH,

.......Tom


-------------------------------------------------------
The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004
Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration
See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA.
http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn
_______________________________________________
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