Are you looking for a new monitoring software for your IT Operations department? Are you overwhelemd by the offerings today not even including the open source solutions for example nagios and company. Excellent free tools are hard to find that deliver reliability when it comes to false alarms. That's probebly the last thing you need, is to upset the departments your supporting by sending out false alarms.

Recently evaluating a potencial purchase for one of the largest online retailers, the monitoring tools Hyperic, Nimsoft, Uptime, Cittio and ProactiveNet (recently aquired by BMC). Each of these tools have a good set of people supporting the products in terms of explaining the features. It helps to have a good set of people on your side who understand the challenges you are dealing with when it comes to monitoring and quickly deploying within a few days or even in hyperic's case immediatly though auto-discovery of linux processes that are running when the agent starts.

Hyperic a San Francisco based open source monitoring product that has a very cool looking interface ( ajax ) and auto-discovery feature ( command line scrapper) . Plattforms supported are Linux, Solaris and Mac OS, Windows XP. Looking at an IT department with a few boxes your can quickly deploy the auto discovery agents and identify your mysql database and apache server no problem. Here is a link how it does its auto-discovery (http://www.hyperic.com/demo/index.html). There are key features missing in this product including multi data center support. I really look forward to the vision to where the open source products Nagios and Hyperic are going in terms of event management.

Nimsoft a european based company has one of the most fastest log scrapping utilities I've seen. These guys really know there stuff when it comes to digging through logs and finding exceptions from Java Apps. Actually, this log file agent is almost as fast as Splunk's enterprise montoring application. Nimsoft provides decent network up/down, diagrams and features that exceeds Splunk's featureset and focus. There is a real lack when it comes to transaction monitoring, application monitoring and database support. It's like come on haven't you found out that there is a database called Oracle? Support for other databases than SQL Server would be greatly appriciated. Also the Visual Basic platform Nimsoft has adopted for its user interface and monitoring on has alot of nice drag-and-drop features. It was not to interesting to see the GUI hang on Windows (the only plattform supported) and CPU spike at a high volume of events. Pricing was optimal the sales team literly bent over backwards in terms of pricing and gave thier best to exceed the customers expectation.

Cittio, all I can really say about this tool is the that it supports SNMP. All monitoring is SNMP focused and extends the SNMP monitoring approach. Events correlation, transactions, application, database and network monitoring other than SNMP is questionable.

Oracle (OEM) was also pretty interesting. Of all the tools it surly has the deep-dive database monitoring down no question. database resource utilization outstanding. The only thing when actually meeting the folks there was the the product manager at oracle for OEM asked us during the conversation "What is NOC?". From there on we knew kind of what to expect ;)

Overall these tools are very interesting when it comes to extending your nagios implementation. Providing a dashboard for nagios events seems like its worth a try. Honestly when it comes down to features there is a great deal of effort being made to show the value add of these products compared to nagios. Any of these products I cannot recommeded for enterpriese monitoring.