Repost: Comparing things

January 6, 2010
filed under genevainformation, opennms
Tagged , ,

Someone asked me to dig through the blog archive, but instead of finding what he asked me to look for, I dug out an older article which might be good to repost..

A friend of mine picked on me in regards to the OpenNMS Iphone App. For Nagios, he said, there were plenty of Applications on the Appstore. I did not check whether that’s true or not. Mostly because it does not matter.

First, the OpenNMS IPhone app is created by the creators of OpenNMS. It’s not a third-party thing which makes use of interfaces which have initially been designed for something else. “Our” app (though it’s really the sole work of Rander Rick) uses the newly introduced Restful interfaces into OpenNMS. That means version 1.8, yes. But it means as well that we talk about a native integration, using interfaces which were actually thought for integration and will be maintained in the future with that very purpose in mind.

You can, by the way, use these interfaces for much more than an IPhone app (which reminds me that I should really add a chapter about REST to the book). And, as a part-time amateur programmer with an unhealthy addiction
to PERL I can tell you that REST is much more usable than SOAP. And it does the same thing, in the end (show me the applications which realy make use of the versatile capabilities of SOAP and WSDL, you’ll not find many). Yes, I do think that SOAP is a real pain in the butt and that already replacing EDIFACT by XML did not bring a lot of added value. But it looked cooler, that’s true. I wrote EDIFACT interpreters in Perl and that was fairly straightforward and lean…now talk about XML ;-)

Nothing new here, that’s my rant since 1996 or so and I’m really comfortable with it.

So coming back to why it does not really matter if there are ten, twenty or twothousand apps for the iphone for Nagios: The fact that Nagios addresses a different market does not change.

To illustrate that I did a quick google in my brain to come up with a suitable parable, and I illustrated it with

this:

Unimog on tails

..this is an incredible useful truck, call “unimog”. “Uni” comes from “universal” and don’t ask me where “mog” comes from. Right, it comes from “motorgerät”, “universal engine powered utility” or so. The Unimog is a success story of Mercedes-Benz (completely opposed to my experience posted below which shows the top of the engine of my Mercedes station wagon). Initially intended to be a “better tractor” it was quickly adopted in all environments which had a need for a powerful engine with basically unlimited fields of use. It can replace a tractor, a bagger, a snow plow. And in this picture you can see that indeed, it can even replace a locomotive.

The way that works is that the steel belted wheels you see in the front and the end of the engine are pushed o
n the rails. The normal, tired-equipped wheels are used, still, to transmit the engine power onto the steel rails.

And that works, you can actually pull (or push) a train with a unimog.

But. Let’s look a bit at performance. One of the first diesel-powered locomotive in germany was the V200. Started in 1953, it puts 1618 kW on the rails. It has a maximum speed of 140km/h which is, think back 60y in infrastructure, pretty fast

The newest Unimogs (see here) are able to perform with 160kW. That’s 10% of what an almost 60yo locomotive puts out.

This does not mean that the Unimog is “bad”. The contrary is the case. It’s a great tool, you can use it in a lot of situations, it’s incredibly flexible and so on. But if y
ou want to operate a railroad network your choice of engines would probably rather go towards something like the V200 as a locomotive as opposed to having your trains pulled by Unimogs.

And to come back to the starting point of the discussion. A lot of things which are bolted on to Nagios try to make it enterprise grade. We add steel wheels to roll on railroad tracks as we add somehow the capability to understand SNMP or to provide usable Notification Paths. But in the end, all those efforts will not lead to an enterprise network management solution. Sure, you can use Nagios for that. As much as you can run your railroad network with Unimogs.

(If you ask yourself why I am writing this, it’s Matteo’s Reto’s fault)

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