Big Brother

Big Brother is an enormously successful product in the server hardware monitoring world. Although it’s not a database-centric application, it does allow you to monitor the status of all your network services, including all the Oracle databases on your network. Big Brother is a very helpful tool for those who need to perform system administration as well as database administration. Among its other features, Big Brother allows you to configure email notification, a feature that’s increasingly necessary for 24 × 7 support staff.

In addition to its Oracle support, Big Brother also provides almost unlimited modifiability, so we feel that it’s worth including in this chapter. We also mention Big Brother because its development has been ongoing for quite some time; it provides a good model for open source software development, as well as for development of a potentially lucrative after-care support market. If you want to your software to cover your rent, Big Brother is where you learn how. It’s also the tool Karma was modeled after.

Sean MacGuire has been developing and enhancing Big Brother since 1998, and it is still very much in active development, with downloads by both Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems (among literally hundreds of thousands of others). For proof of how useful a tool Big Brother can be, check out some of the demos on Big Brother’s web site.

The main web site for Big Brother is:

http://bb4.com

To see a demo, check out:

http://bb4.com/demo.html

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