Here is a sample of the main Big Brother display page.
This page is updated by Big Brother at the interval set by the BBSLEEP variable in runbb.sh; by default this is every five minutes. Each dot represents the status of a particular test on a particular machine; the color at the left of the screen reflects the current "worst" status for any test. In the sample, there is a red dot for a test which is not shown in the picture.
This sample shows how you can group the hosts being monitored into categories: in this case there are groups for "My Machines," "Infrastructure,", and "New Additions." It also shows that you can define additional pages to contain information on other hosts. There are two additional pages shown under "Pages Hosted Locally"; each one has at least one test giving a yellow result, but nothing showing red or purple.
You can click various parts of the display to perform Big Brother functions or see additional information:
The toolbar at the upper left lets you create reports, acknowledge notification messages, switch to condensed view, and open this help file.
Click any host name to display notes about the host entered by the Big Brother Administrator.
Click any column heading to open this help file and show the definition of that column.
Click any dot on a host status line to show more information about that test. From the detail page this displays, you can click the History button to show recent results for the last 24 hours and the 50 most recent log entries. The history display may also include custom content defined by your administrator.
Note. When you click a dot, you always get the most recent results for that test; it's possible these results are more recent than the test that was used to create the main display page, so the status may be different.
Click the colored dot on a page line to show that page.
There can also be a "summary area" at the bottom of the page, which is not shown in the sample above. It looks something like this:
This area shows the worst condition being monitored by another BBDISPLAY server, which is sending its results to this page via a summary directive. You can click the colored dot in the appropriate column to see either the condensed or full display of the status page from the other server.
The results of any modem bank testing display at the end of the page, after the summary area.
If an administrator has added any custom content to the page, it is displayed at the end, just before the footer.
Note. The color at the left of the screen may change for CPU or HTTP warnings. These can usually be disregarded since, by default, Big Brother is very sensitive during these tests. Similarly, Internet connections may turn yellow when the network is heavily loaded. Although it should be checked out, this is usually not a problem unless the whole Internet section goes yellow.
There are HTML anchors available othe displayed pages. On the main bb.html page, you can access various parts of the page by referencing the following anchors:
begindata - Skips the header
hosts-blk - idem
pages-blk: Points to the "Pages Hosted Locally" table
summaries-blk: Tagged to the "Remote Status Display" table
dialups-blk: Jumps to the "Modem Banks" table
On any other pages, you only have access to the begindata and hosts-blk anchors.