The issue I have is that Android 2.2 is out, and it isn't even particularly new - but Samsung still don't support it. And - as Alen said, it sucks that iPhone does it. HTC on 2.1 by the way, supports changing ports, because they fixed it in their Android 2.1 skin.

I'm disgusted with Samsung Android support having been on the phone with them three times today! I have a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone, it's pretty new having been released in July, but it has Android 2.1 on it. My company runs exchange on non-standard TCP ports, so I need to be able to specify the port when connecting exchange. This is not possible in Android 2.1. There is a public patch for 2.2 to allow this - but Samsung have not released 2.2 for their phone. While web rumours say "September" - none of their support team were able to tell me when, or make a beta or any sort of patch which would solve the base problem (lack of proper MS Exchange support!) in their product. We are buying 8 new smartphones for new hires - looks like we'll have to use iPhones (which we recently moved away from because of battery issues). Samsung can't even move their leading smartphone to the 2.2 platform - god help anyone trying to get support on this pad... JK

Both Yacoob and Afabbro have some great lists above (especially Afabbros list!). A combination of these features would be an ultimate system.

I work for a company called iQuate - I amd the CTO and have been (sometimes literally) developing a monitoring system for about 7 years. We do many of the things mentioned in the 2 lists, but not all (I wish!). We have a product called iQRMS which integrates several functions, the largest of which is monitoring.

- It is agentless - it uses about 30 different protocols (including SNMP obviously!) to connect to remote machines, so it can be deployed very quickly and gives a pretty "true" picture of client connectivity (which sometimes an agent based approach will not).
- It is horizontally scalable (you can have many scanning services on many computers and they will load balance between them).
- It has failover built in - when 1 or more of the scanning services die, the others redistribute the load.
- It has intelligent aggregation of data, recording max, min and average values for any monitor over time - for up to 6 years - in such a way that it doesn't just eat disk and kill performance (that one took a while to crack...)
- It has pretty graphs and in-depts reports on events
- It supports complex (or simple!) escalation rules to control who gets told about what, when and how often when events happen
- It integrates with a helpdesk (it's own or others)
- It allows you to create templates of monitors using different protocols to get a wider picture of an issue
- It is easy to understand and designed with 24x7 operations in mind (hence all that failover/scalability)
- It doesn't cost the earth

It also doesn't do some of (1 of) the things Timothy mentions at the start of the post (gratz on the new job btw!) - specifically it doesn't create a 2D map of the environment, although there are some plans to implement that in future. It treats and represents devices in the network as groups of hosts - it doesn't display them in relation to physical layout...

Maybe it's worth having a look at it Tim, I can certainly vouch for the support being excellent (but like I say above - I'm biased :))

JK

Both Yacoob and Afabbro have some great lists above (especially Afabbros list!). A combination of these features would be an ultimate system.

I work for a company called iQuate - I have been (sometimes literally) developing a monitoring system for about 7 years. We do many of the things mentioned in the 2 lists, but not all (I wish!). We have a product called iQRMS which integrates several functions, the largest of which is monitoring.

- It is agentless - it uses about 30 different protocols (including SNMP obviously!) to connect to remote machines, so it can be deployed very quickly and gives a pretty "true" picture of client connectivity (which sometimes an agent based approach will not).
- It is horizontally scalable (you can have many scanning services on many computers and they will load balance between them).
- It has failover built in - when 1 or more of the scanning services die, the others redistribute the load.
- It has intelligent aggregation of data, recording max, min and average values for any monitor over time - for up to 6 years - in such a way that it doesn't just eat disk and kill performance (that one took a while to crack...)
- It has pretty graphs and in-depts reports on events
- It supports complex (or simple!) escalation rules to control who gets told about what, when and how often when events happen
- It integrates with a helpdesk (it's own or others)
- It allows you to create templates of monitors using different protocols to get a wider picture of an issue
- It is easy to understand and designed with 24x7 operations in mind (hence all that failover/scalability)
- It doesn't cost the earth

It also doesn't do some of (1 of) the things Timothy mentions at the start of the post (gratz on the new job btw!) - specifically it doesn't create a 2D map of the environment, although there are some plans to implement that in future. It treats and represents devices in the network as groups of hosts - it doesn't display them in relation to physical layout...

Maybe it's worth having a look at it Tim, I can certainly vouch for the support being excellent (but like I say above - I'm biased :))

JK