Cacti is great for monitoring SNMP hosts and has some incredible graphing abilities. The problem I had with Cacti is simply that there’s no useful OS error monitoring. So, there became a requirement for either a replacement or additional monitoring system.

This was where System Center Essentials came in. It had the promise of SNMP monitoring, windows agent support and other goodies. Unfortunately even with SP1 the performance was poor and I was frequently plagued with meaningless alerts (to which the Microsoft solution was to filter them out). SNMP reporting was so poor that SCE just had to go.

I then came across Zenoss, so far it looks really swish. It has a nice user interface, SNMP graphing and WMI interaction with windows hosts – meaning full event log monitoring. Check out the screenshots below and then go and take a look at their website!