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Big Brother® Professional Edition

SIMPLE. FLEXIBLE. SCALABLE. EXTENSIBLE.

Big Brother® is a Web-based, IT infrastructure monitoring & diagnostics solution. With easy-to-implement, custom business dashboards, anyone can determine the health of the IT network at a glance.

        

Dashboard Big Brother simplifies IT systems management by allowing both system administrators and management to quickly and easily assess the health of the environment through a series of customizable, web-based, business dashboards. It features tests to notify administrators when defined events occur, thus facilitating proactive problem resolution to prevent critical outages or service breaches.

Big Brother is able to monitor and provide alerts for nearly everything in the IT environment that has an IP address. The product supports common operating systems including Windows, UNIX and Linux. In addition, Big Brother has an active user community which provides regular contributions to product.  This vast repository of user-contributed scripts makes Big Brother highly extensible for complex, heterogeneous environments.

Integration with Quest's Real-Time Diagnostic Monitoring Solution, Spotlight

Big Brother natively integrates with Spotlight® to enable users to proactively pinpoint and trouble shoot the root-cause of problems so that resolution can be obtained quickly.

It serves as the server and device monitoring engine, but beyond monitoring for high availability, systems need to be proactively managed to ensure optimal performance. So, once Big Brother alerts the administrator of a condition, a quick, in-context launch into Quest Software's Spotlight allows the user to gather domain-specific information and quickly resolve performance issues.

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 real-time system status information in either a Web-based or WML-based format (Unix/Linux version only) for WAP-enabled devices. An intuitive display shows which servers or devices are experiencing issues allowing 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 can be 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, acknowledgments, 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.  Active community 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.

There are more than 1000 Plug-ins available at: www.bb4.com/community

Please visit our new Big Brother website: www.bb4.com






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