Cutting edge IT software - what's out there and what do you use

I am sys admin for many servers running unix (solaris, HP, Linux) and also some windows server and solaris x86

I want to know what leading software is out there whether it be freeware, shareware or commercial that can do things listed:
Performance monitoring (hardware/software, disk usage, memory usage etc over a time period etc)

  • graphical display and reporting of the above
    Process automation / scheduling / alarming in event of failure of a scheduled and automated job

What have you guys used and would recommend?

I want to do something new, something that will get the job done but also look impressive to match the effort. I am mainly interested in something that will cover the unix / Linux system but any advice appreciated

Sun Management Center - Overview
IT Service Optimization with Capacity Planning Software
Nagios Enterprises
Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center | Sun | Oracle
http://www.managementsoftware.hp.com/

Nagios, and Ganglia.

Check out Splunk. Not free, but very, very good. Easy to use and implement, and tons of features - very powerful.

Yes - have heard of this, Is it good for performance monitoring?

Anyone heard of Sarcheck - again its not free but I have applied for a trial license. Any experience of it - good or bad? How does it compare to the likes of splunk etc..

Thanks for all the replies to date - I have heard of most of whats mentioned but they dont all cover various OS's or have some nice outputs in graphs etc that can be used for reporting to mgt level

Zenoss Community edition, best free snmp based monitor software I have found so far. It has graphing ability, supports any SNMP aware system ( Windows monitoring via WMI), Nagios is good for monitoring non-snmp applications, but monitoring
CPU/Disk space via sar/df output is awkward.

Open Source Network Monitoring and Systems Management - Zenoss Community

We used splunk mostly for alerting and problem monitoring. But it's totally configurable so we could easily have written the scripts to collect performance data as well.

It seems there is a new "Ultra-Cutting-Edge" version of Nagios called "Nagios XI"... It was released a few months ago... Haven't tried this new version though.