“Big Brother does most things that you’ll find in commercial
monitoring tools; it can let you know when a machine on your
network is down or becoming overloaded or when a filesystem is
getting too full; it can tell you when specific processes are or
are not running on clients; it can even page you when a specific
event occurs. It can be used to monitor Unix, Linux, Windows
NT, and NetWare clients.”
“One of the main reasons you’ll want to try out Big Brother is
because of its simplicity. It is composed of just a handful of
scripts and programs, which collect information and report it to a
central server, which displays everything in an accessible HTML
format. Big Brother’s scripts are easy to change and reconfigure,
allowing you to customize the software to suit your network.”
“Although it is not covered directly by the GNU General Public
License, you can download Big Brother for free from the MacLawran
Group’s Web site. It is covered by a “fair use” license, which
requires written permission from the MacLawran Group to
redistribute it.”