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Network and Telecommunication Services - Big Brother
What is Big Brother?
Big Brother is a program that monitors all of the servers and network hardware (switches, wireless access points, etc.) for the Hamilton Network. When hardware or software goes down, Big Brother will show this on its webpage.
How do I access Big Brother?
2. The web page that appears tells you what services are currently operating normally, and which services are down.
What do the icons mean?
A green icon means all is OK.
A red icon means that a service is currently down. You may click on this red dot to view further information, such as a specific system/service that is down, and possibly what the problem is.
A yellow icon means that there *may* be a problem with a certain server / service. Usually, this indicates that the service is still functional, but may be slow.
A purple icon means "no report" is available for the service. This may mean that the service is down or that it is very busy.
A Blue icon means that maintenance is being performed, and this service will be available again soon.
Viewing historical data:
If you drill down to a specific host and service, you can click on the history button, and it will show you the hourly, daily, and monthly statistics and a log of the last 50 status changes. This is useful when one needs to know how long something has been down, and to see the extended history of events related to that service. For example, to see the history of the connection for the Web Server that has been stored, one would first go to the main page: http://bb.hamilton.edu. Then, click on the icon under "conn". A page displaying extended information about the Web Server connection appears. At the bottom of this page, there is a "history" button. Clicking this button displays in-depth information about the connection of the Web Server, including 25 hour, 10 day, 33 day, and 10 month statistics. Portions that are red mean that this service was down during that time.
Generating Reports for Uptime
Sometimes, it is useful to view the uptime, as a percentage, of a particular service over the last week, month, or year. This can be easily done by generating a report as follows: 1. Go to http://bb.hamilton.edu.2. Click the report button in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
3. Choose your report parameters in the page that appears. You can choose the time frame to check the uptime for, and also the types of events to consider "downtime".
4. Click "Generate Report." You are now presented with a page that looks almost like the Big Brother main page, but if you click on the actual components of this page, you will see some servers / services have a number next to them, while others have the green icon. Those that have the green icon have been up 100% of the time during your specified time frame. Those that have numbers show the percentage of time that the service was up. Then, by clicking on these actual numbers, you can see all the types of events that occurred during the specified time frame.
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