Server Monitoring (Score 3, Interesting)

I've recently taken the position in a large multi-national company to monitor our devices as well. We are only about a year into it. We also use a mixture of OpenSouce and commercial tools. The thing I've noticed mostly with most software today is that they are becoming more and more a mix. For instance our main managment software is currently Netcool. Netcool is commercial but it utilizes Apache, Tomcat and alot of Perl/CGI. On the commercial side it uses Java, and thier own proprietary DB called Omnibus as well as a Sybase Communications protocal. The end result it is extremenly flexible and works across all platforms I've tried with little trouble. I really don't think the future of software will be as black and white as OpenSource vs Commercial. Its really going to be a mix of both. The benifit is lower costs to the customer because of less development effort for the vendor. I like Netcool alot because its very nature is to be as flexable as possible. Its possible to use Netcool for other puposes that the develpers never thought of. Our HP NNM system is good but is nowhere near as flexible simply because it can only go as far as HP wants it to go. Hence it is only used for network discovery and SMNP trap collection. Bottom line is that the best choice in software today is the software the includes some OpenSource code.