Big Brother vs Nagios

[Lloyd H. Meinholz]

I don't have experience with Big Brother, but I have used nagios for a
couple of years. I've found that it works well for me. I have about 20
hosts and about 90 services I am monitoring. Nagios is very flexible and
configurable as far as what you are monitoring. There are also some
interesting plugins available and a method for writing your own if you
have something peculiar to monitor.

IMO, the only problems nagios are that it is a bit overwhelming and
confusing at first and the config files seem unnecessarily verbose. A
smaller site I am monitoring (8 hosts, 20 services) has about 1200 lines
in cfg files (some white space and comments, but not overly so).

I think if you invest 3-5 days learning and setting up nagios for a big
site like yours, it will work well for you and you shouldn't have to
mess with it much after the initial install.

If bb4 does what you want, maybe it's not worth the effort moving to
nagios. Sorry I don't have more of a comparison. Why are you thinking
about leaving bb4?

Lloyd


On Tue, 2004-10-19 at 09:53, Shane Presley wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone had any comments/experiences on Big Brother
> vs Nagios?  I'm looking to monitor about 60 servers (Solaris &
> Windows), and our network devices.  I had been set on BB4, but
> recently learned about Nagios.  So I'm looking for some help from the
> group.
> 
> Thanks!
> Shane