Big Brother Administrator's Guide

Big Brother is an application that monitors System and Network-delivered services for availability. Your current network status is displayed on a color-coded web page in near-real time. When problems are detected, you're immediately notified by e-mail, pager, or text messaging. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Information Technology Division uses Big Brother and has developed this Administrator's Guide to assist in configuring and setting up this application in an Enterprise.

Description:

Big Brother provides monitoring for the following services:

• Windows
• Linux
• Unix – AIX, BSD, Debian, Solaris, etc.
• Network Throughput
• Network Latency
• IO
• Synthetic Transactions
• SLA’s
• Oracle
• UPS’s
• Routers
• Firewalls
• The Weather
• Anything....

Big Brother was developed by the Open Source community and is currently "hosted" by Quest Software. There is a free version as well as an enhanced Professional Edition version available at www.bb4.org. The Administrator's Guide was developed for the free version.

The guide covers a number of topics ranging from installation on various operating systems to configuration and monitoring procedures. The free version of Big Brother is licensed under a Better than Free license (see www.bb4.org/license-text.html), and the guide is licensed under the Creative Commons License

Please note that Hobbit is the next generation GPL replacement of Big Brother and can be found at http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net . We currently do not have a Hobbit user guide avaiable, but administration tasks are very similar to Big Brother.

Contact Info:

timothy.vaverchak@state.ma.us

Download URL:

Click to Download

License:

Free for non-commercial use

Audience:

• Municipal Government

• State Government