I have used BigBrother and Nagios for a long time to troubleshoot network problems, and I was happy with them -- until Zabbix came along. Zabbix is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution for servers, network services, and network devices. It's easier to use and provides more functionality than Nagios or BigBrother.

Zabbix is a server-agent type of monitoring software, meaning you have a Zabbix server where all gathered data is collected, and a Zabbix agent running on each host. Note that you can have more than one Zabbix server installed, but you cannot consolidate data from multiple servers in one single central server. All Zabbix data, including configuration and performance data, is stored in a relational database -- MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle -- on the server. Zabbix server can run on all Unix/Linux distributions, and Zabbix agents are available for Linux, Unix (AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD), Netware, Windows, and network devices running SNMP v1, v2, and v3.

Zabbix is easy to install and configure.

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