ok ... I am far too intoxicated to chime in at this point ... so I'll try again when I'm sober. (Hope y'all don't take this too seriously - my post that is)

Ok, Zenoss when it's grown on you is still ok, but just ok. With anything but SNMP based setups, it can be a false positive fest. Flapping hosts and service port checks are waaaaay hair trigger. A crappy day in the network neighborhood (groan) can easily generate a ton of alerts that are bogus. I still haven't found a way to mellow it out. SNMP checking is flawless w/ it though... which is fine unless you don't want 161 open or like us use SNMP for other nefarious purposes. The kicker was when I hit the Zenoss irc channel and was shunned because I didn't want to do SNMP checking, I only want checks via SSH, written by us. And we do use SNMP inhouse for other things, running Net-SNMP in parallel on another port broke the crap out of things the developer really like and I had a crappy time sorting back out. Supposedly the latest release has fixed the SSH checking options (broken in 2.0.4 and 2.0.5 for us) and all should be well... To late for me though, I have pressure from above to ditch it.

My interim solution has been to keep Nagios kicking around, then select machines with Monit on them are plugged into Nagios. Monit is pretty darned cool. I also cobbed an older VALinux 1220 machine from parts and put Munin on it (Zenoss had a nice RRDTool interface), I think no matter what, we are going to keep Munin around, we like it. Munin is a great utility that is easy as pie to set up, I even managed to get the plugin installed on old Solaris. Good times!

I am glad though there are choices as nothing has come close to doing everything we want, I'll just keep trying things and eventually, some day, I will be able to sleep all night again. Check out Monit, it really is a great little snitching/restarting daemon watching daemon.