In this document:
Hobbit is a tool for monitoring servers, applications and networks. It collects information about the health of your computers, the applications running on them, and the network connectivity between them. All of this information is presented in a set of simple, intuitive webpages that are updated frequently to reflect changes in the status of your systems.
Hobbit is capable of monitoring a vast set of network services, e.g. mail-servers, web-servers (both plain HTTP and encrypted HTTPS), local server application logs, ressource utilisation and much more.
Much of the information is processed and stored in RRD files, which then form the basis for providing trend graphs showing how e.g. webserver response-times vary over time.
Hobbit was inspired by the Big Brother monitoring tool, a freely available tool from BB4 Technologies (now part of Quest Software) with some of the features that Hobbit has. But Hobbit is better than Big Brother in many ways:
Big Brother is implemented mostly as shell-scripts, and performance
suffers badly from this. In large networks where you need to monitor
hundreds or thousands of hosts, processing of the data simply
cannot keep up. Another problem with BB is that it stores all
status-information in individual files; when you have lots of
hosts and statuses, the amount of disk I/O triggered by this
severely limits how many systems you can monitor with one
BB server.
Hobbit avoids these performance bottlenecks by
keeping most of the ever-changing data in memory instead of
on-disk, and by being implemented in C rather than shell scripts.
Hobbit keeps all configuration data in one place: On the Hobbit server. Big Brother has lots of configuration files stored on the individual servers being monitored, so to change a setting you may need to logon to several servers and change each of them individually.
Big Brother has a huge number of add-ons, available from the
www.deadcat.net site. This
is both a blessing and a curse - you can find anything you need
as an add-on, but many of the add-ons really ought to have been
part of the base package. E.g. the ability to track historical
performance data, simple things such as monitoring SSL-enabled services
and SSL certificates, or just something as simple as a GUI for
temporarily disabling monitoring of a system. Maintaining and improving
all of these add-ons gets really complex.
Hobbit has all of these features built-in so you don't have to worry
about getting the right add-ons and maintaining them - they come with
the base package.
Also, when it comes to deploying the client-side packages, Hobbit
clients require no configuration changes when you install them on
multiple hosts. So you can setup a template client installation,
and then blindly copy it to all of your hosts.
New Hobbit versions appear regularly, usually every 4-6 months. In contrast, development of Big Brother appears to have stopped - at least when it comes to the non-commercial (BTF) version.
Although the BB "Better-than-Free" license permits the use of BB for non-commercial use without having to buy a license, it is still a non-free package in the Open Source sense. I fully respect the decision of the people behind Big Brother to choose the licensing terms they find best - just as I can choose the licensing terms that I find best for the software I develop. It is my sincere belief that an Open Source license works best for a project such as Hobbit, where community involvement is essential to get a tool capable of monitoring as many different systems as possible.
An interesting essay appeared recently, which tries to explain why Open Source is the natural way for a software product to evolve. If you are curious as to why the trend seems to be that more and more software exist in an Open Source version, I suggest you have a look at it.
Yes I did. The bbgen toolkit was the name I used for Hobbit from 2002 until the end of 2004 (i.e. bbgen version 1.x, 2.x and 3.x). The bbgen versions relied on a Big Brother server to hold the monitoring data and status logs, and this turned out to be a real performance problem for me. So I needed to completely replace Big Brother with something more powerful. In March 2005 version 4 was ready and capable of operating without any need for a Big Brother server, so I decided to change the name to avoid any misunderstanding about whether this was an add-on to Big Brother, or a replacement for it. Hobbit no longer has any relation to Big Brother.
Choosing a name is hard. I wanted a name that was easy
to remember; could be interpreted as a somewhat meaningful acronym;
and one that did not refer directly to the Big Brother origin.
"Hobbit" could mean "High-performance Open-source BB ImplemenTation"
but it might as well just be a name. If you're familiar with the
Hobbit's in Tolkien's books, you will know that hobbits are very fond of
things that are green - just like any systems- or network-administrator
prefers his monitoring screen to be. They also pay a great deal of
attention to what is happening around them, and are capable of doing
things that you would not think they could when you first saw them.
All of these characteristics apply well to the Hobbit monitor.
It is your choice. I think Hobbit has many improvements over BB, so I would of course say 'Yes, I think you should'. But in the end it is You who have to deal with the hassle of setting up and learning a new system, so if you are comfortable with what Big Brother is doing for you now, I am not forcing you to switch. If you want to see what some of the Hobbit users think about changing to Hobbit, check out this thread (continued here) from the Hobbit mailing list archive. The executive summary of those messages is that You won't regret switching.
The Hobbit sources are available on the project page at Sourceforge.
There are two mailing lists about Hobbit:
If you have a specific problem with something that is not working, first check the list of known issues, and try to search the list archive. If you don't find the answer, post a message to the Hobbit mailing list - I try to answer questions about Hobbit in that forum.
Several projects have sprung up around Hobbit:
My name is Henrik Storner. I was born in 1964, and live in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark which is a small country in the northern part of Europe. I have a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Copenhagen, and have been working with computers and Unix systems professionally since 1984. I have been developing bits and pieces of Open Source software for the past 10 years - you'll find my name in the Linux kernel CREDITS file - and I am actively involved in the local Linux Users Group SSLUG, one of the largest LUG's world-wide, where I am a systems administrator for their Internet servers (web, e-mail, news).
I started using Big Brother around 1998, for monitoring a bunch of servers that I was administering. In late 2001 I began working for the CSC Managed Web Services division in Copenhagen, and one of my first tasks was to improve on the monitoring and SLA reporting. After looking at what the standard tools could do, I decided to setup a Big Brother system as a demonstration of what could be done. This was an immediate success. Systems were rapidly added to the Big Brother monitor, and I began to see some of the scalability problems that happen when you go from monitoring 50 servers to monitoring 500 (not to mention the 2500 hosts we are currently - 2006 - keeping tabs on). So I decided it was time to do something about it, and during the autumn and early winter 2002 bbgen was born. The rest is history.