The Big Brother Network Monitor is designed to monitor your network devices. It can watch servers, routers, NT boxes, and a number of other items using extensions. The default install supports the monitoring of services that may be running (web services, POP, ssh, etc). If you install the client on a remote machine you can monitor disk space, processes, CPU load, and most anything else you want to write a script for.
The Big Brother daemon and a few utilities are written in C. The vast majority of the system is written in shell script. It used to be a very ugly poorly documented heap of spaghetti. It has improved significantly, but it's still pretty ugly. It does, however, generally work.
Configuration of the host monitoring portions is very straight forward. Configuration of the notification portion takes a few tries to get the desired result, and gives you good control over who gets what notifications when.
If you have an suggestions, comments, or corrections, please let me know.
scottm@octaldream.com
Oct 12, 2000