Big BrotherA Network Monitoring Product

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Big Brother ”A Network Monitoring Product

Big Brother is a network monitoring product that is freely available in the public domain. It can be obtained from the Big Brother Web site at http://www.bb4.com. Although the product itself is free, the writer(s) of the software offer formal support and licensing, if required. Big Brother comes complete with source code and access to extensive documentation, including Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) lists.

Big Brother is designed to allow anyone , but primarily administrators, to see how the systems and network are performing in near real time from any Web browser. It displays information as Web pages and is easy to read and understand. Figure 13.1 shows a typical top-level screen.

Figure 13.1. The clear nature of the displays and the ease of configuration make Big Brother an attractive option.

The display shows the systems being monitored down the left side and the tests for each system across the top. The user ends up seeing a matrix of color-coded dots on the screen, with green representing "no problems" and red representing "big problems." The background color of the status Web pages is also coded according to the most serious condition of any monitored element at that time.

Big Brother is a system and network monitoring package; it does not carry out any management, corrective action, or proactive maintenance. It highlights a problem and then the administrator fixes it. Big Brother is suitable for smaller installations; larger companies might use a more comprehensive monitoring and management product, such as Solstice Site/Domain Manager, which is discussed in detail in Chapter 14.

The software is downloaded and installed on a designated Big Brother server, which needs to be running Web server software, such as Apache, for hosting the Web pages. It includes support for testing FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, DNS, Telnet, IMAP, NNTP, and SSH servers as the default, but other tests can easily be added. The Big Brother software polls systems at regular intervals and retrieves information about its current status. An optional element is available to install Big Brother client software on other systems to be able to monitor disk space, CPU usage, and system messages. These clients send (push) the information to the Big Brother server at regular intervals instead of making the server poll (pull) the data. The Big Brother server can also check that specified processes are present and running. Figure 13.2 shows the disk space monitoring display for a client system.

Figure 13.2. The reporting tolerances can be easily set for each file system being monitored.

Big Brother supports additional plug-ins, which can be written in any language. Users have contributed hundreds of extra plug-ins for a variety of purposes, including monitoring the CPU temperature on Solaris systems, checking Oracle or Sybase databases, and so on. A full list of the plug-ins available for download can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.deadcat.net.

The product is flexible in that all alarms and warnings are completely configurable so that they can be modified to suit the particular needs of a business. Also, external scripts can be written and included, for example, to monitor and report on bespoke or in-house applications software.

Big Brother includes a notification mechanism that is, again, fully configurable. It can automatically send paging requests and can be configured to notify based on a variety of criteria. Acknowledgement and escalation procedures are also built into the product.

As another feature of Big Brother, the product supports historical reporting, which can be used to determine whether SLAs are being met or to analyze the cause of a problem after the event. Figure 13.3 demonstrates a CPU usage event report.

Figure 13.3. The background color provides an insight into the severity of the event, and the report shows additional information.

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