Up down monitoring to me is one of those jobs in the computer business that is as boring as watching paint dry. Looking to see if the server is red (dead), yellow (slow) or green (happy) all day, everyday takes fortitude. Some people like a huge screen or six to watch the activity of the whole enterprise. They remind of the megalomaniacs in my comic book reading days of the people that wanted to take over the world with their the big screens with lots of blinking lights.

But in the security world, I look at monitoring as a way to indicate if a server might be at risk. If a server goes down many times without a good reason or the hard disk fills up quickly or the CPU is pegged at 100% for long periods of time, it may indicate that someone (internal or external) is using the server for unintended reasons. Not good. I have used many monitoring products from BMI, HP, and Microsoft but right now for my current gig I have been testing GFI Network Monitor. I use GFI when setting up monitoring for a mission critical system for a small/medium business. Might not have the bells and whistles of an HP OpenView but it does not have the price tag of it either. If you are a small shop but have a mission critical server or two that you need monitoring, GFI might fit the bill.