Section G-1. Big Brother


G-1. Big Brother

Big Brother is one of the most established and popular web-based console monitoring packages available. It gives the user a console or dashboard look-and-feel with typical green, yellow, and red dots indicating system status. Big Brother can monitor information such as connectivity (ping), DNS, FTP, and HTTP, to name a few. Additional (free and commercial) plug-ins and agents (with prewritten samples) are also available.

Availability reporting can help you quickly assess a server's or service's uptime. Notifications are somewhat complex and can be based on machine name, time of day, or event or test that failed. There's even support for delaying alerts (to allow nuisance alarms to resolve themselves) and email paging.

A commercial version, Big Brother Professional Edition (PE), that offers encryption and compiled versions for certain platforms is also available.

We recommend running through the demo at http://demo.bb4.com/bb. Although the demo shows the Professional Edition, it gives you a good sense of the overall look-and-feel of the application.

The main Big Brother PE screen is a top-level dashboard that displays a grid of green, yellow, and red icons that assess system status. The left column lists the servers and the top row lists various tests and conditions. In short, when things are running well, square green icons display. Otherwise, you might see a flashing red X for a system in trouble, a yellow circle for something that needs attention, a pink swirling icon for a system for which there is no report, a white icon for a system that is unavailable, or a blue circle for a system that is offline.

The column names on the grid (bkp, conn, cont, cpu, dig, disk, and so on) are abbreviations for various tests. Clicking on an icon drills down into the test and shows the results since the last poll.

While test results are important, the time the test was last taken is more important. Depending on the polling interval, you could be looking at data that is a few seconds old or a few days old. Every system and test can be set up differently. Before you react to any alert, check the live system.


Clicking on the HISTORY button will take you to a screen that shows the historical data for that server and test. It shows a graphical timeline for the last 24 hours (if the system was in trouble for part of that time, the timeline shows various colors). Below that is a table that displays system state by percentage for the last 24 hours. The bottom table shows the last 50 log entries for this test.

Big Brother has come a long way, and now it does even more with the advent of the Professional Edition. The documentation, FAQs, and support list make this a great application to use. Table G-2 summarizes the details about Big Brother.

Table G-2. Big Brother

URL

http://www.bb4.org

http://www.quest.com/bigbrother

License

Better Than Free (http://www.bb4.org/license-text.html)

Operating systems

Unix, Linux, and Windows (WS 2003, Windows 2000, and NT 4.0 with SP3)

Written in

Java, JavaScript

User interface

Web-based

Additional requirements

A C compiler and a web server

Notes

Be sure to check out http://www.deadcat.net (sponsored by Quest Software) for a wealth of add-ons and plug-ins to help you customize Big Brother for your environment.





Essential SNMP
Essential SNMP, Second Edition
ISBN: 0596008406
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 165

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