Monitoring your enterprise (or not so enterprise) systems is like the icing on the cake for service compliance, as it augments and automates some of the ITIL processes that should have, by now, reached a reasonable level of maturity in all IT environments.

While having been exposed to expensive enterprise level tools in the past (CA, Tivoli, BMC), and having used some "cheaper" tools as well (WhatsUp, ManageEngine OPManager), I continued my quest to find a cheap, possibly free tool that would be suitable for small to medium environment.

A while back I came across Mikrotik's TheDude, but was in a busy period so have shelved it and forgot about it. A few weeks ago I have re-downloaded the current version and deployed it on my lab and environment as a test drive. I have to admit that I am deeply impressed about several aspects:
- it's free
- it's easy to install and run the initial discovery
- it's extensible through SNMP (as it's agentless)

I highly recommend considering and test-driving this monitoring tool - while it can be up and running in a few hours in a small environment, with associated enthusiasm it can be programmatically extended to match tools dedicated to the high-end of the market (enterprise class).

Here are a couple of links to get you started. Drop me a mail at the usual address if we can help you setting it up or extending it. I am taking a particular interest in monitoring Windows Services, processes and event logs at the moment.

http://www.mikrotik.com/thedude.php (description)

http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=12402 (thread about extending monitoring/probes)

http://dude.mt.lv/dude (online demo - was not working when I tested, but we can give you a test drive on our own demo system - just drop us an e-mail)