{bb} Netsaint vs The BigBro

["Feldman, Jim" <Jim.Feldman@compaq.com>]

Maybe more for the Archives than for discussion, but whatever...

I've been running BB1.2a and 1.3 in a limited production capacity for a few
months now.  I wanted to be REAL familiar with it prior to rolling it out to
some 90 servers at 3 sites.  I wanted to do some comparison shopping, as it
were, and so I recently installed NetSaint 0.0.5b3. The install was on a
RedHat Linux 6.0 (Intel) box.  I didn't test the history functions.

I'll break this into 4 pieces:  Install/Config, Customization, Monitoring,
and
Notification.  I'll assume the reader is familiar with a BB install

Install/Config:
	The netsaint install was fairly intuitive, but had numerous steps to
make the web interface work.  Two files control the whole config, hosts.cfg
and netsaint.cfg.  The hosts file, actually is where all user definitions
reside. In addition, they introduce the concept of a "parent" host.  Let's
say
you have to go through a specific router to reach a group of systems. The
router is the parent of those systems.  If the parent "dies", Netsaint
understands that the children will become unreachable, and it doesn't bother
to alert on their missing responses.  I would say that the BB install was
easier, and quicker, but the Netsaint config files (while more verbose) were
easier to follow and maintain, and the "parent" concept is a good idea.

	The client install for BB wins major points, and the existence of an
NT
client is a big plus for mixed OS shops.

Round 1:  I'd give to Netsaint, if all you're going to do is "probe" level
monitoring.  Otherwise,  BB is the big winner.

Customization:
	The various tests that Netsaint can use, are specified in the
hosts.cfg file.  The tests are based on a "plug-in" concept, which
abstracts them from the main code.  Integrating a new test is quite simple,
BUT limited, in that you can only return one line of text that will get
passed
on to the mail or paging system.  An exit status is tested to check for the
result of the test.  Adding custom tests to BB isn't all that difficult, but
the process could stand better documentation.

Round 2: Netsaint wins here, unless you need to return extended status
texts.

Monitoring:
	BB follows the KISS principle while Netsaint likes LOTS of pictures
for
the display system.  To some extent the effectiveness of a graphical display
system is based on the receiver of that information, so it's a tough call
here.  My preference is for simple; tell me what's broke.  In BB's favor,
you
can have multiple displays without having multiple testing. This is a big
win
in a distributed data center environment.  I also like the way BB handles
it's
communication with it's clients better, and I consider it much more
"firewall"
friendly. Since you can fan out your BBNET hosts in remote LANs, you don't
tie
up as much WAN traffic with testing. The "parent" concept is a nice one, and
would be a good addition to BB somewhere down the line.

Round 3: Netsaint has more bells and whistles in the display, but my
personal take on usability says this clearly goes to BB (particularly in the
case of slower WAN links, firewalls, redundency, and NT boxes)

Notification:
	Well this one's pretty easy.  Netsaint decided to abstract itself
from the
process.  You can send email or you can send email to a mail-pager
gateway.  To their credit, it would be fairly easy to drop qpage in, but
there is none of the escalation stuff.  They do allow you to configure when
notifications occur, but have no way for escalations to work. They also have
no way to ack notifications. A tweak I'd like to see in BB is some way for
a sysadmin to put a system into maintainence mode for some period of time.
Now
I know you can do this from the config files, but it would be nice to have a
check box in the display that allowed you to do this, and also showed/paged
that the system had been put in this state and when it comes out.  This does
open a whole can of worms around html page security though...

Round 4:  BB by default.

Unless Don King had something to do with this matchup, I think it's safe to
say that BB is the winner.

jim feldman

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
To unsubscribe from this list, or to subscribe to the bb-digest list
send e-mail to mailto:majordomo@bb4.com with unsubscribe bb -and/or-
subscribe bb-digest in the BODY of the message.