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 started out as a replacement for a small part of Big Brother, and owes a great deal of inspiration to how Big Brother works. But Hobbit has grown to become a full scale monitoring solution, with features that match or exceed what Big Brother can do.
There were a number of reasons why I decided to develop something to replace Big Brother.
BB is implemented mostly as shell-scripts, and performance suffers greatly from this. In large networks where you need to monitor hundreds or thousands of hosts, processing of the data simply cannot keep up.
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 was essential
to my use of BB, but this relies on the LARRD add-on which is not
fully integrated into BB. Other "must-have" features - e.g. the
ability to check SSL-enabled services and SSL certificates -
required more add-ons to the standard BB.
Maintaining and improving all of these add-ons as new versions
were released was getting complex.
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.
At least for the non-commercial (BTF) version, there hasn't been any real changes for more than a year.
So in the end, writing something new turned out to be the most reasonable way of getting the system I need. And besides, it's a lot of fun.
Yes I did. The bbgen toolkit was the name I used for this collection of tools from 2002 until the end of 2004 (i.e. bbgen version 1.x, 2.x and 3.x). With the release of version 4, bbgen has evolved into a complete replacement for the server-side of Big Brother, and 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. Since Hobbit provides all of the functionality needed for a systems- and network-monitoring tool, I felt the time was right for moving away from the Big Brother relation that was present in the "bbgen" name.
All of the tools from bbgen are included in Hobbit. So you may continue to use these together with your Big Brother/bbgen installation.
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.
My name is Henrik Storner. I was born in 1964, and live in Copenhagen, Denmark. I have a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Univ. of Copenhagen, and have been working with computers and Unix systems for more than 20 years. 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. 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.
The Hobbit sources are available on the project page at Sourceforge. There are also Debian- and RPM-packages for Linux systems available.
NetBSD users can install Hobbit via the NetBSD packaging system. See the NetBSD README file.
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. If you don't find the answer there, post a message to the Hobbit mailing list - I try to answer questions about Hobbit in that forum.
Please - do not post Hobbit questions on the Big Brother mailing list. The people behind the Big Brother software have stated that they prefer not to have Hobbit discussed on the Big Brother list.