Zenoss

But it seems like a very unstable piece of software so far. We've kept paying attention to ZenOSS from prior 1.0, until 2.0.3 (which is the most recent version available today).

We see that regressions keep appearing between releases.

On the other hand though, it has as previously mentioned great potential, and will probably one day become a great monitoring tool.

Prior to discovering Zenoss I had been a long time Nagios user. I had dabbled in the other major open source players in this arena as well, including Big Brother, Munin, Hyperic and Groundwork.

After 4 years of writing Nagios customizations I was a little disappointed to learn that Zenoss already did everything I had spent so much time developing, and MUCH more straight out of the box.

To top all of this off, Zenoss has the backing of a real company. Not only does this provide the obvious advantage of having a support channel standing behind the product, but more importantly it allows for a very aggressive release schedule. I've lost count of the number of times I asked, or even thought of a feature I would love to see only to see it exist in the latest release.

If you're looking for an all-in-one network & systems management platform with event management and a configuration database, this just could be the only valid option out there unless you have the bucks to have HP or IBM come in a develop something for you.