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Here's a quick overview of BigBrother for those who haven't used it before.

The BigBrother display which runs in a browser window has two primary views. The main view is the one that displays when accessed from this link: http://bigbrother.nukecops.com. This view shows a list of all servers being monitored by the NukeCops BigBrother implementation. It's a valuable view since it shows all the sites and services in a single list with all statuses visible. (It's nice to see all the little green dots showing a good status for all servers.)

However, in order to see only error conditions and recent changes in status, there a condensed view available. This can be accessed by clicking the circled-arrows symbol in the upper left of the BB display window, or by using this alternate url: http://bigbrother.nukecops.com/bb2.html. This view may be preferred as it more readily highlights any errors conditions, and provides a recent history of server status changes.

Some other features of the BigBrother display include:

o The BigBrother webpage uses the META REFRESH tag to trigger an automatic update of the display window every 60 seconds. (You'll need Meta Refresh enabled in your browser for this to function properly.)

o The title of the browser window begins with the overall status color. The sample BB image shown below is titled "green:" and, of course, this matches the color on the entire left side of the BB display.

o The browser window title and the entire left side of the BB display will show the color that reflects the most significant status for any server on the BB screen. Therefore, if one server is in a critical outage, then the entire left side of the screen and the browser title will be "red".

o The history report function is very useful in that it allows you to get an overall trend of how particular services are performing (i.e. %availability and such).

o The help button displays a very detailed FAQ and help page. The authors of BB literally tell you all about the package, including how to customize it and all about how it works. (You have to love this kind of software package. It is so very un-Microsoft in that it tells you everything you could want to know about the product.)

The BigBrother Server:

The BB server itself has a polling time of 5 minutes. So, even though the browser window is refreshing every minute, the BB host is actually polling the monitored servers and daemons processes every 5 minutes. This is more than sufficient to provide both timely alerts and to log the data necessary to generate good trend analysis performance reports.

Hints on using the BigBrother monitor window:

Some people with large PC displays put a BB window along the left most edge of their screen, leaving a small amount of it visible while working in other Windows off to the right. This allows them to see a long strip of color, reflecting overall status at all times on their screens. Setup like this, the switch to red is very noticeable, quickly alerting the user to a change in status.

If you don't have the screen space available, just minimize the BB browser window and watch the text name in the taskbar. Since the window name starts with the overall worst status, just watch for a non-green window name.

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