Hobbit Monitor: An Open-Source System Management Facility
The Enterprise Management Integration (EMI) community site is organized to provide SAS®9 enterprise business intelligence customers with tips, techniques, and tools for integrating and interfacing with vendor enterprise IT system management facilities. In working with SAS customers, the EMI team has observed the need for organizations to have an open-source method of systems management. Hobbit Monitor, an open-source systems monitoring facility, is a suitable solution for this need. Hobbit Monitor is available through SourceForge, a Web site (www.sourceforge.com) that provides free hosting for open-source projects.
Hobbit Monitor Features, Components, and Considerations
Hobbit Monitor's features and capabilities enable you to monitor servers, applications, and networks. The system provides a set of easy-to-use, Web-based interfaces (as shown in the following example) to monitor the health of network nodes and applications.
Hobbit Monitor Features
Hobbit Monitor has simple, elegant, intuitive, and robust installation and configuration features:
- The installation process is almost effortless.
- Configuration is simple and straightforward, using keywords and tags.
- Hobbit provides a wealth of health information, without additional configuration steps.
- You can easily add customized scripts for site installation requirements.
Hobbit Monitor Components
Hobbit Monitor provides a robust suite of alert and reporting components. You can also extend and customize the system's capabilities for your organization's unique monitoring and management requirements. Hobbit Monitor components include:
- the Hobbit Server, which collects system health statistics on connectivity; CPU, memory, and disk utilization; process status; and related operating-system metrics
- the Hobbit UNIX client and the BBWin client for Windows, both of which report the health statistics to the server
- integrated facilities for historical reporting, graphing, finding trends, and administration
- Web-based methods to acknowledge, test, and enable or disable alerts
- UNIX methods that use shell language scripts to extend the features.
Hobbit Monitor Considerations and Additional Resources
Before you make a decision to use Hobbit Monitor, you need to consider the following:
- Hobbit Monitor is an open source project, distributed under GNU GPL License. Enterprise customers might have restrictions on the use of GNU GPL software.
- Hobbit Monitor is supported on most UNIX and Linux operating systems.
- Hobbit clients are available for UNIX and Linux operating systems, with a compatible client (BBWin) available for Windows operating systems.
Additional information about Hobbit Monitor is available from these resources:
SAS 9.1.3 and Hobbit Monitor Integration
The EMI team has integrated Hobbit Monitor with the SAS 9.1.3 business intelligence (BI) architecture, providing an inexpensive, simplified system for monitoring the operational status of your SAS BI servers. SAS customers can download a copy of our integration documentation, Using Hobbit Monitor with SAS 9.1.3 BI Servers - An Appetizer.
SAS Sample Hobbit Automatic Configuration Program for UNIX
In addition to the Hobbit Monitor integration documentation, the team has implemented a sample .SAS program to execute on your UNIX-based SAS metadata server to dynamically create the SAS versions of the Hobbit /etc/bb-hosts and /etc/hobbit-client.cfg files.
SAS Sample BBWin Automatic Configuration Program for Windows
And for those environments that are utilizing BBWin client monitoring, the EMI team has developed a Windows-based sample .SAS program to execute on your Windows hosts to dynamically create the customizations that are required in the /etc/BBwin.cfg files to monitor Windows services for your SAS servers.
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