BB compared to Nagios - concluding remarks.

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 11:54:01AM -0800, nagios-users-request at lists.sourceforge.net wrote:

  .. bye bye Multipart and Base64.

     Please gentle writers, configure your 
     MUA - what you write your email with - so that it only sends out
     text. Why ? so that _digest_ readers don't have to skip
'
> From: "Gavin Bartle" <gavin.bartle at aspectcapital.com>
> To: <nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net>
> Subject: [Nagios-users] Status Information
> 
> 
 
> 
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IFBhY2tldCBsb3NzID0gMCUsIFJUQSA9IDAuMjQgbXMgaW4gdGhlIFN0YXR1cyBJbmZvcm1hdGlv
'

   before getting to something that a text MUA can read.


> Message: 17
> Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 08:48:40 -0500 (EST)
> From: Tom Diehl <tdiehl at rogueind.com>
> Subject: [Nagios-users] Re: Comparison of Big Brother and Nagios
> 
> 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:

> > 
> > - BB: No scheduled downtime.
> 
> Not true. bb-maint.pl will do this quite nicely.
> 

> > 	- No template-based configuration.
> 
> don't need it. Config of bb is MUCH simpler than Nagios.
> 
> > - BB: Agent-based monitoring.
> > 
> > 	- Uses own protocol rather than SNMP.
> 
> Can use both.
> 
> > - 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.
> 
> > - 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.
> 
> 
> HTH,

It helped me and think would have helped anyone interested in an 
objective comparison.

This tight, lean analysis of what people see as 

1 important in a monitoring product 

2 how each product rates on those important factors 

is very useful.

FWIW, the two areas I think that Nag lags along the path of world 
domination are

1 reporting

2 rule support


To some extent reporting is a matter of the colour of the bikeshed; no
one will ever like the way it's done partly because the most vociferous
about reporting are those that really want to do them again to justify
their own positions (change the colours in Excel etc).

All I can say about this is it is probably too big a problem for me to 
even think about; I simply don't know where to start.

However, Alert frequencies are very useful in correlating reporting
trends with problem inception. Perhaps I need to look at trends again.
At the moment I do perl one liners on the Nag log.

With respect to rules, I am not sure if this is handled slightly in Nag 
with templates. It occurred to me that it is silly to define an 
escalation for each service when it could be (if it can) be done as a 
template.

Rules however are a more general way of expressing relationships between 
classes of events or objects.

Examples of rules that may be useful for monitoring include

1 All alerts that have not been acknowledged after <interval> must be 
escalated

2 Escalated network events should cause notification of the network 
manager

3 Network alerts that 'correspond' to backups running can be ignored

4 Network alerts that 'correspond' to servers being jumpstarted can be 
ignored.

Rules express in a succinct readily comprehensible form what should be 
done for all the items in the rule category. They come naturally to 
people and it would be nice if the monitor could accept them as 
natually.

John Rouillard (sorry if the spelling is wrong) has written at some 
length about how Sec rule processing could benefit Nag.

I use Sec and am enthusiastic about it's application, but I think that
this is not the way to go: Nag needs to be able to processe events
according to rules that the user can formulate within Nagios; the rule
input, parsing, and the comparison of each event with the rules leading
to the corresponding action needs to be built in.

Nagios already processes events according to certain embedded rules such 
as

1 Don't check services that are disabled

2 Don't raise alerts if notifications are disabled.

Providing this facility for general user defined rules is a big ask 
however.

> .......Tom >

Yours sincerely.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stanley Hopcroft
------------------------------------------------------------------------

'...No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...'

from Meditation 17, J Donne.


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