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:

• Hobbit can handle monitoring lots of systems.
  

  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 has a centralized configuration.
  

  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.

• Hobbit is easy to setup and deploy.
  

  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.

• Hobbit is actively being developed.
  

  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.

• Hobbit is licensed as Open Source - Big Brother is not.
  

  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.