[TriLUG] demoing F/OSS innovation(s)

[Aaron S. Joyner]

craig at cookitservices.com wrote:

>>If there's a regard in which some F/OSS package is better than it's competitor from the 
>>proprietary world, then show that.  Or maybe demonstrate to people
>>that they can, using F/OSS do things they may have thought were either
>>impossible, or prohibitively expensive.
>>    
>>
>
>I am an expert in Big Brother system monitoring software.  I'm my opinion, it can complete with BMC Patrol and HP openview, and far easier to use.  www.bb4.com.  It has a "Better than Free" license which allows organisations to use it for free as long as they don't directly make money off it.
>
>I installed and customised a site monitoring over 1500 devices on their network.  $4 billion biotech company.
>
>It is easy to install and monitors 1+ servers, SNMP devices, networks, etc.
>
>I am willing to put a presentation (live demo) together showing it running on linux.
>
>Craig Cook
>  
>
Okay, I'm going to try to say this as gently as possible.  :)  In the 
past, I've been a *huge* fan of BigBrother, and have used it extensively 
for upwards of 3-4 years.  Unfortunately, I finally got tired of it's 
kludgey nature, it's poor performance, and it's web interface which is 
sadly lacking in features, and most of all it's god-awful paging / 
notification rules.  All of these things can be worked around with 
careful planning, and addon packages (BBGen, custom scripts for enabling 
/ disabling services, scheduling downtime, etc), but it really does take 
some getting used to.  BB is the grandfather of open-source network 
monitoring, but sadly it is a) no longer free for commercial use and b) 
not keeping up with the pace of development from other more open 
alternatives.

Personally, I've settled on Nagios as a *fabulous* replacement that 
addresses every concern I had about BigBrother, and makes a far superior 
replacement.  Sure, Nagios isn't perfect either - a) the config files 
are very verbose, and take a bit of time to setup, but they are very 
clear by comparison to BB, and b) the paging routines don't intuitively 
allow you to separate notification times by pager and email (it's 
possible, just not intuitive).  But the web integration is fabulous - 
enabling / disabling service checks, notifications, scheduling downtime 
- all things which required modding BB to death all come out of the box 
with Nagios, and they are nicely integrated.  The service scheduler is 
very intelligent (it spaces out all the service checks in a very "smart" 
manner) and allows for easily and rapidly re-checking services (i.e. if 
a service check that runs every 30 mins fails, then recheck it three 
more times, but at 1 min intervals instead of 30 min intervals).  By 
comparison BB fires of an enormous battery of tests all at once, at the 
predefined interval (5 mins by default), and they all run at once.  The 
only way to have a service rechecked if it fails is to have it not go 
critical until it's failed X number of checks (which will happen in 5 
min intervals, like it or not).  Under the hood, Nagios is all written 
from the ground up in C, almost all of it's service checks are written 
in C, and it's very cleanly designed.  BigBrother, by contrast, is a 
horrible mish-mash of mostly Bash shell scripts, a little bit of C that 
was rewritten out of necessity, and a fair number of it's service checks 
are written in PERL.  There are some overlays that clean this up 
significantly (BBGen is a rewrite of most of the core functionality in 
C, and is orders-of-magnitude faster than stock BB), but you're still 
left with a less-than-elegant solution.

The one big thing BB has going for it is deadcat.net - a repository of 
hundreds upon hundreds of service checks, for just about anything 
imaginable.  But personally, I have yet to find many services that 
Nagios can't monitor for me - and the ones that I did require took me 
less than an hour or so to whip up a plugin to monitor (dialin to the 
Intrex modem pools, being one example).  And the best thing about 
Nagios?  Open source.  100% GPL free for commercial use, happy to the 
core software.  No strings attached.  To find other users who agree with 
my take on things, you don't have to look too far - check out NCSU's system:

http://nagios.org/userprofiles/viewprofile.php?profile_id=126

Aaron S. Joyner