I’ve just finished configuring Nagios for the network at my office. Until now we’ve used a hodgepodge of monitoring stuff that never really did the job all that well. Nagios took me about 2 days to configure properly, and it was by no means easy or intuitive but now that it’s all done and I know how the system works some I have nothing but praises for it.
Nagios will monitor just about any kind of server or service you can throw at it, and it will notify you when there are problems. That’s just touching the surface, but for those things it does a great job. It will also do uptime reporting, escalations, dependencies and all kinds of stuff I havn’t even looked at. All this and it’s free. Yay Open Source!
If you want to run a robust monitoring solution for your network and don’t want to spend billions of dollars on something like HP OpenView, you could do worse than install Nagios.