Hi, We have a stable Scom 2007 R2 infrastructure and I have deployed mainly microsoft MP's for monitoring our environment. One of the constraints of the deployment was no money for chargable MP's. However, now funding 'may' be released and was wondering if there is any popular 'must-have' MPs which provide the best added value to the mainly free microsoft MP's. We are mainly a microsoft house with VSphere virtualisation on EMC and moving to Cisco UCS. Some of my monitoring issues at the moment are lack of network layer moniotring (mainly cisco) for 'end-to-end' monitoring. also would like some better monitoring of Oracle, Printing devices (on Server 2008). I appreciate the query is a bit vague and there are good 'free' community packs - just most of the ones I evaluate seem to have other dependances (like VMM for the UCS MP and quest base framework...). Just looking a top 5 to go look at in more detail and if they're free all the better!! Cheers

Hi! For your network equipment I would advise you to look att the community MP xSNMP, you'll find that one here: http://xsnmp.codeplex.com/ There should be an Oracle MP there as well, that is in beta. I havent tried it. www.bridgeways.ca has one MP for Oracle. For your vmware monitoring you should try out Veeam's MP and Bridgeways dito.mats.w | www.opsmode.com

Hi! For your network equipment I would advise you to look att the community MP xSNMP, you'll find that one here: http://xsnmp.codeplex.com/ There should be an Oracle MP there as well, that is in beta. I havent tried it. www.bridgeways.ca has one MP for Oracle. For your vmware monitoring you should try out Veeam's MP and Bridgeways dito. Regarding the printing MP Kevin Holman has a post on some printing, http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2010/11/10/how-to-monitor-print-services-on-server-2008-r2.aspx and here is a community MP http://blogs.msdn.com/b/steverac/archive/2010/12/04/focusing-on-the-printer-printer-monitoring-mp-supplement.aspx mats.w | www.opsmode.com

Mats, thanks for the heads up - I'll check those ones out as a starter for 10 ;-)...