Product Information
Big Brother® is a Web-based system and network monitor. A universal color-code interface of "red is bad and green is good" allows anyone to measure the health of a network at a glance.
Big Brother simplifies the management of networks of computers. It features tests to notify administrators when defined events occur. This facilitates proactive problem resolution and prevents critical outages. With Big Brother, system administrators can visually assess the health of a network through a color-coded Web interface. Designed around simplicity, anyone looking at the interface can understand the red, yellow and green display.
Big Brother is able to monitor and alert on almost anything in your network. The product supports common operating systems including the major flavors of Windows, Unix and Linux. In addition, the huge user community has greatly contributed to the extensibility of the product. An enormous repository of user-contributed scripts makes Big Brother highly customizable to your environment.
Integration with SpotLight®
Big Brother integrates with Spotlight® to deliver a complete proactive enterprise monitoring solution. Big Brother serves as a framework, and is able to provide a layer of broad systems availability monitoring, helping system administrators manage large numbers of servers, networks, devices, and IT services..
Beyond monitoring for high availability, systems need to be managed for optimal performance. Once Big Brother alerts you of a condition, you can launch Quest Software's Spotlight from the Big Brother interface to gather domain specific information and quickly resolve performance issues. Spotlight is a real-time diagnostic tool designed to diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks before users are affected.
Product Capabilities
Component |
Description |
| Architecture | A client-server architecture, used in conjunction with mechanisms to both push and pull data, permits Big Brother to run agent-less for network tests or use agent-based configurations for more detailed client information. This provides low overhead and high flexibility. |
| Redundancy | To ensure a catastrophic failure does not restrict alerts, redundancy is supported to allow multiple instances of Big Brother to run in parallel. Clients can report into multiple Web displays and notification servers. |
| Display | A graphical interface displays, in real-time, system status information in either a Web-based or WML-based format (Unix/Linux version only) for WAP-enabled devices. An intuitive color-coded representation of which servers are experiencing issues allows users to quickly determine what areas need immediate attention. |
| Network Tests | Out of the box support includes the ability to test ftp, http, smtp, pop3, dns, telnet, imap, nntp and ssh servers. Support for additional tests is easily added. |
| Local Tests | When installed on a local machine, Big Brother monitors disk space, CPU usage, messages, and the existence of user-defined processes. |
| Notification | Sophisticated notifications based on time of day, machine or failed tests are generated. Advanced features such as paging groups, acknowledgements, escalations, and delay before paging (to eliminate erroneous notifications of self-resolved problems) are also supported. |
| Availability Reporting | Historical information about status changes is stored and used to generate availability and service level agreement (SLA) reports. |
| Plug-ins and Extensions | Big Brother was designed with extensibility in mind. Plug-ins can be written in any language, and users from around the world have written hundreds of extensions to monitor everything from VMS and AS/400 clients to CPU temperature on Solaris machines. |
