Download Big Sister 1.02

Big Sister is, as we mentioned last time, not a new Endemol program but a high-quality network and system monitor with support for SNMP. This allows you to easily monitor the network with the various servers from a central point and detect critical situations in a timely manner. For more information, we refer you to the online documentation which also like PDF file can be brought in. The developers released version 1.02 with the following note:

Release 1.02 comes with rather unspectacular new functionality. Besides the new performance data database allowing Big Sister to display more expressive charts and simple statistical analysis of trends, the new SLA report generator does now processcollected availability data into management readable form. A few new health checks have been implemented – such as the new ping test collecting line performance data, a file access performance test, the BT Ethernet box test monitoring environmental data and a new interface for custom-made health checks. Of course, a number of bugs have also been fixed.

The Big Sister Agent MSI package for Windows is now considered stable. Unfortunately, the promised availability of the complete Big Sister suite as an MSI package had to be postponed to release 1.03.

The manual revision 1.9 is included in the released packages and is mostly in sync with Big Sister release 1.02 – the brand new SLA report generator lacks some documentation, though.

Version 1.02:

• SLA report generator producing a “nice” regular document
• additional types of performance graphs: histograms
• database support for performance data history
• MSI package for Windows agent
• monitoring intervals <1min
• new plugins: fileaccess (file access time and file write bandwidth for fileserver access), ping (rewritten ping test with roundtrip times and package loss performance graphs), btethernetbox (Environmental monitoring)
• one more interface for external custom-written health checks: ExPeDaP