Big Brother is pretty cool. I remember using it long ago too :)
I certainly respect the simplicity of BigBrother, but the scopes of the products are completely different. Rackspace Cloud Monitoring is a SaaS built with the ability to be used by hundreds of thousands of unique customers, monitoring millions of 'things'. It also has a goal of never losing the trust of our users -- user's generally don't care if your data center is having a bad day, but they certainly do care if you didn't alert them when their site is down, and so multi-region durability gets added to a requirement list.
Complexity does come from these kind of requirements.
Big Brother is pretty cool. I remember using it long ago too :)
I certainly respect the simplicity of BigBrother, but the scopes of the products are completely different. Rackspace Cloud Monitoring is a SaaS built with the ability to be used by hundreds of thousands of unique customers, monitoring millions of 'things'. It also has a goal of never losing the trust of our users -- user's generally don't care if your data center is having a bad day, but they certainly do care if you didn't alert them when their site is down, and so multi-region durability gets added to a requirement list.
Complexity does come from these kind of requirements.