Re: {bb} BB+bbgen vs BS

[Henrik Storner <henrik-bb@hswn.dk>]

In <41AE3D3D.9090200@trantor.org> Galen Johnson <gjohnson@trantor.org> writes:

>I don't recall if this has been covered previuously but has anyone (or 
>can anyone) done a side by side comparison of Big Brother + BBGen to Big 
>Sister?  I'd be interested in everyone's thoughts.

I must confess that I have had a peek or two at Big Sister - but also
that I've not had the patience to actually get it up and running.  My
look at BS has been to see if they had some good ideas that could be
useful in bbgen.

>From what I've seen, it seems that BS has better SNMP integration
than BB, and might therefore be more suitable if you have to monitor a
large number of devices using SNMP (e.g. network infrastructure gear).

There's an interesting review of BS at
http://www.techworld.com/netman/reviews/index.cfm?fuseaction=displayreview&reviewid=130&page=1&pagepos=4

One attraction with BS over Big Brother is the licence - at least for
some, using Open Source software is preferable to commercial software
such as Big Brother (even with the BTF license). bbgen is GPL, so this
will (mostly) be a non-issue when bbgen 4 is released.

I don't know how much BS has looked at scalability and performance
issues when designing it. It does not seem to be something that they
focus on. For bbgen, scalability has been a major design factor - my
original goal with bbgen was to enhance BB to allow monitoring several
thousand hosts in a BB system; I doubt if that would be possible with
BS (SNMP tends to be a somewhat slow way of gathering data).


Henrik (who is obviously biased in this regard)
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