White Paper

This white paper discusses how Big Brother can be a real-time, cost sensitive monitoring solution for your network servers and devices. Learn how you can quickly, easily and affordably improve uptime, meet SLAs, and solve problems before they have far reaching impact!

Read now »

Tech Brief

This guide will help you plan for your Big Brother deployment and leverage the product’s features to maximize both the IT and business benefits.

Read now »

Webcast on Demand

Join industry expert and Microsoft MVP, Don Jones and Quest Software's Big Brother team as they discuss how to easily manage your complex, heterogeneous environment with a single solution: Big Brother...without compromising your budget.

Watch now »

Big Brother

Visit shop.quest.com to buy this product online.

Buy online »

Join the Brotherhood!

Download, create, and share custom plug-ins, join a conversation, or find technical expertise in the Big Brother plugged-in community.

Join now »

Big Brother Professional Edition

Simple. Flexible. Scalable. Extensible.

When it comes to server monitoring, Big Brother® is a trusted solution for flexible, affordable, and dependable coverage. Our professional edition provides heterogeneous server monitoring on any network — within minutes of installation. You can even operate Big Brother from your Smartphone, as well as, support Windows Server 2008, and VMware. Plus, it’s supported by an active online community that offers more than 800 free monitoring plug-ins and scripts. So get comprehensive infrastructure IT monitoring at a cost that fits in any budget.

Download

Buy

Features
Sys Reqs
Videos
Screenshots
Docs

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. Easily add support for additional tests.
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 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: http://communities.quest.com/community/big_brother

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

System Requirements

Before installing Big Brother Professional Edition, ensure your system meets the following minimum hardware and software requirements:

Platform	Intel x86, PPC, Sparc, Itanium, PA-RISC
Memory	4GB
Hard Disk Space	1GB for installation 40GB (enabling the performance/trending feature and using will require significantly more disk space)
Operating System	Red Hat Enterprise Server 3.0/4.0/5.0 (x86) SUSE Enterprise Linux 9.0/10.0/11.0 (x86) Solaris 8 and greater (Sparc and x86) HP-UX 11.0 or 11i (PA-RISC client & server) (Itanium, client only) AIX 5.2, 5.3 or 6.1 (PPC, client only) MAC OS X (x86 darwin 9.7, client only) Windows 2000 Server, Professional, 2003 server or Windows XP with most recent Service pack, Windows 2008, Windows 7
Additional Software	Web browser Adobe Flash player 9 or higher (if Flash display is used)

Big Brother is Watching - And It's a Good Thing!
Join industry expert and Microsoft MVP, Don Jones and Quest Software's Big Brother team as they discuss how to easily manage your complex, heterogeneous environment with a single solution: Big Brother...without compromising your budget. Play video »