Big Brother (alias BB) was a tool for systems and

network monitoring Network monitoring is the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator (via email, SMS or other alarms) in case of outages or other trouble. Network monitorin ...

, generally used by

system administrator A system administrator, or sysadmin, or admin is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems, especially multi-user computers, such as servers. The system administrator seeks to en ...

s. The advent of the

dynamic web page A server-side dynamic web page is a web page whose construction is controlled by an application server processing server-side scripts. In server-side scripting, parameters determine how the assembly of every new web page proceeds, and inclu ...

allowed Big Brother to be one of the first monitoring systems to use the web as its

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

. Prior to this, monitoring tools were generally console based, or required graphic terminals such as

X Window The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...

to operate. Big Brother produces

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

pages containing a simple matrix of hosts and tests with red and green dots to denote system status. Big Brother was named after

George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalita ...

's character Big Brother from his novel ''

Nineteen Eighty-Four ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (also stylised as ''1984'') is a dystopian social science fiction novel and cautionary tale written by the English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final ...

''. E-mail from Big Brother originated from the

Ministry of Truth The Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Plenty are the four ministries of the government of Oceania in the 1949 dystopian novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', by George Orwell. The use of contradictory ...

, and users of the software were called Brothers. The application was designed to allow non-technical users to understand system and network status information through a simple interface and presentation, using a matrix to display status information for overhead displays in Network Operations Centers (NOCs). It was designed to monitor computer systems and

networks Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

, and for this reason does not use

SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behaviour. Devices that typically ...

natively, instead using a

client–server model The client–server model is a distributed application structure that partitions tasks or workloads between the providers of a resource or service, called servers, and service requesters, called clients. Often clients and servers communicate ov ...

and its own network

communication protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchroniza ...

. Clients send status information over port TCP port 1984 (possibly a reference to the novel

1984 Events January * January 1 – The Bornean Sultanate of Brunei gains full independence from the United Kingdom, having become a British protectorate in 1888. * January 7 – Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast As ...

) at five-minute intervals. Since the clients only send information to a specific monitoring server, its creators claim it is more secure than SNMP-based protocols, which poll clients for information. For this reason, Big Brother was featured at

SANS Institute The SANS Institute (officially the Escal Institute of Advanced Technologies) is a private U.S. for-profit company founded in 1989 that specializes in information security, cybersecurity training, and selling certificates. Topics available for t ...

security conferences in 1998. 1999, and at a SANSFIRE conference in 2001. Big Brother has also been cited in a number of books on

system administration A system administrator, or sysadmin, or admin is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems, especially multi-user computers, such as servers. The system administrator seeks to en ...

computer security Computer security, cybersecurity (cyber security), or information technology security (IT security) is the protection of computer systems and networks from attack by malicious actors that may result in unauthorized information disclosure, t ...

, and

networking Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

. The application supports redundancy via multiple displays, as well as

failover Failover is switching to a redundant or standby computer server, system, hardware component or network upon the failure or abnormal termination of the previously active application, server, system, hardware component, or network in a computer n ...

. Network elements can be tested from multiple locations and users can write custom tests. An

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

version of the project exists: between 2002 and 2004 it was called bbgen toolkit, between 2005 and 2008 it was called Hobbit, but to avoid breach of trademark, it was renamed Xymon which is still in development and use.

Background

Sean MacGuire wrote Big Brother in 1996 after he received what he believed to be an overpriced quote for network-monitoring software. He introduced it in an article for ''Sys Admin'' magazine in October 1996. In August 1997, it was mentioned in an article by Paul Sittler in ''

Linux Journal ''Linux Journal'' (''LJ'') is an American monthly technology magazine originally published by Specialized System Consultants, Inc. (SSC) in Seattle, Washington since 1994. In December 2006 the publisher changed to Belltown Media, Inc. in Housto ...

'' Shortly after the initial release, Robert-Andre Croteau joined MacGuire and added notification rules, which he described in a ''Sys Admin'' article published in September 1998, and created the

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

version. In 1999 MacGuire and Croteau started the company BB4 Technologies, to commercialize Big Brother. They licensed the product under what they called the "Better than Free" or BTF license - "better" because 10% of the license fee went to the charity of the purchaser's choice. In 2001 Quest Software acquired BB4 Technologies. MacGuire and Croteau, the only employees of BB4, later went to work at

Quest Software Quest Software, also known as Quest, is a privately held software company headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California, United States. Quest provides cloud management, software as a service, security, workforce mobility, and backup & recovery. The ...

and continued to work on the product. The Big Brother Professional Edition (BBPE) was released shortly thereafter. In January 2012, MacGuire left Quest software and is no longer associated with the product he created. Quest Software was acquired by

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

in 2012 to form

Dell Software Dell Software was a division of Dell with headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, United States. Dell Software was created merging various acquisitions (mainly Quest Software and Sonicwall) by Dell Inc., the third-largest maker of PCs and now a pr ...

. In June 2016, Dell announced the sale of their software division, including the Quest business, to

Francisco Partners Francisco Partners is an American private equity firm focused exclusively on investments in technology and technology-enabled services businesses. Founded in August 1999 and based in San Francisco with offices in London and New York City, Franci ...

and

Elliott Management Corporation Elliott Investment Management is an American investment management firm. It is also one of the largest activist funds in the world. It is the management affiliate of American hedge funds Elliott Associates L.P. and Elliott International Limit ...

. On October 31, 2016, the sale was finalized. On November 1, 2016, the sale of Dell Software to Francisco Partners and Elliott Management was completed and the company re-launched as Quest Software.

Versions

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", an

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Fla ...

-based display for Big Brother, and formally added graphing and trend monitoring support.

Testing

* Network services — Any TCP network service can be tested for availability, including ( ICMP (Ping),

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most comm ...

SMTP The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typic ...

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH applications are based on a ...

) * System Information including ( processor 5-minute load average, disk usage, messages critical) on all versions of UNIX, Linux and Windows

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s, via native clients. *

tests and traps are supported natively. * Custom tests, generally as bash scripts, although other languages such as

Perl Perl is a family of two High-level programming language, high-level, General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, Interpreter (computing), interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it ...

are supported.

References

External links

{{wikibooks, System Monitoring with Xymon
www.bb4.org
nbsp;— Big Brother BTF version site *https://www.xymon.com/ - Current Xymon site.

Background

Versions

Testing

References

External links

Further reading