Hobbit is the successor to the bbgen toolkit, which
has been available as an add-on to Big Brother since late 2002.
The name change was decided upon when Hobbit acquired enough
functionality to be a stand-alone product. The tools that formed
the bbgen toolkit are still present in Hobbit and are quite
important for it, so if you have used bbgen before, Hobbit
will seem quite familiar.

Hobbit monitors your hosts, your network services, and anything else
you configure it to do via extensions. Hobbit will
periodically generate requests to network services - http, ftp,
smtp and so on - and record if the service is responding as
expected. Through the use of agents installed on the servers,
you can also monitor local disk utilisation, logfiles and processes.