| Original author(s) | Sean MacGuire |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Sean MacGuire, Robert-Andre Croteau |
| Initial release | November 1996[1] |
| Stable release | 4.3 / November 20, 2009[2] |
| Operating system | Unix Linux Windows |
| Type | Network monitoring |
| License | Commercial |
| Website | Official site |
Big Brother (alias BB) is a tool for systems and network monitoring, generally used by system administrators. The advent of the dynamic web page allowed Big Brother to be one of the first monitoring systems to use the web as its exclusive interface. Prior to this, monitoring tools were generally console based, or required graphic terminals such as X Window to operate. Big Brother produces HTML pages containing a simple matrix of hosts and tests with red and green dots to denote system status. Red is bad, Green is good.
Big Brother was named after George Orwell's character from his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although not good for people, Big Brother is doubleplusgood for watching machines. The original Big Brother logo is reproduced at right. E-mail from Big Brother originated from the Big Brother Ministry of Truth, and users of the software were called Brothers.[3]
An open source version of the project exists: between 2002 and 2004 it was bbgen toolkit, between 2005 and 2008 it has been called Hobbit, but as it was already a trademark, it's now called Xymon.[4]
Big Brother allows non-technical users to understand system and network status information because of the simple interface and presentation. Because it uses a matrix to display status information it is particularly well suited for overhead displays in Network Operations Centers (NOCs). Likewise the use of "red is bad / green is good" makes complex systems information more accessible to managers and helpdesks.
Big Brother was designed to watch computer systems and networks, and for this reason does not use SNMP natively. Big Brother uses a client-server model and its own protocol. Clients send status information over port 1984 every 5 minutes. Since the clients only send information to the server, it is more secure than SNMP-based protocols which poll clients for information. For this reason Big Brother was featured at SANS Institute security conferences in 1998,[5] 1999,[6] and at a SANSFIRE conference in 2001.[7]
Big Brother has also been cited in a number of books on system administration,[8] [9][10][11] computer security,[12] [13] and networking.[14]
Big Brother supports redundancy via multiple displays as well as failover. Network elements can be tested from multiple locations and users can write custom tests quickly and easily.
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Sean MacGuire wrote Big Brother in 1996 as a response to an overpriced quote for network-monitoring software he received. Big Brother was introduced to a wide audience by an article Sean wrote for Sys Admin magazine in October 1996.[15] The popularity of Big Brother continued to increase with an article by Paul Sittler which appeared in the Linux Journal in August 1997.[16] Shortly after the initial release, Robert-Andre Croteau joined Sean and added sophisticated notification rules, which he described in a Sys Admin article published in September 1998,[17] and created the Windows version.
In 1999 Sean and Robert created BB4 Technologies http://bb4.com, whose sole purpose was to commercialize Big Brother. The license they used was called the "Better than Free" or BTF license - better because 10% of the license fee went to the charity of the purchaser's choice.[18] In 2001 Quest Software acquired BB4 Technologies.[19] Sean and Rob, the only employees of BB4, migrated to Quest and continued to work on the product. The Big Brother Professional Edition (BBPE) was released shortly thereafter.
There are two versions of Big Brother available: the BTF version (source-code visible), and the pre-compiled fully commercial, professionally-supported Big Brother Professional Edition (BBPE).
In 2009, they released the "Big Brother - Modern Edition," a flash-based display for Big Brother, and formally added graphing and trending support.