System Administration: What's the most underrated tool for infrastructure and network monitoring?

I did a bit of research on our site, IT Central Station, and I found a couple reviews which may be helpful in answering your question: One reviewer of ScienceLogic wrote the following: "Valuable features include Built-in event correlation and analysis intelligently suppresses expected and known events, while escalating alerts for urgent events. The built-in runbook automation has helped drive greater efficiency. The ability to quickly build our own monitoring templates for non-traditional equipment and network interface support. It’s a platform which we’re able to integrate with. It's very flexible." Read the full review here: http://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/sciencelogic-review-by-mike-crowley Another user of ScienceLogic wrote the following as well: "Previously we were using a whole mix and match of different tools to achieve different kinds of service delivery but the key problem for us was there was no holistic view of what was going on deep inside our clients IT systems. We knew that we needed to consolidate and get one tool that would give us that deep visibility." Read the full review here: http://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/sciencelogic-review-by-nick-isherwood You may also want to look at a comparison page, here for example ScienceLogic and Zabbix: http://www.itcentralstation.com/products/comparisons/sciencelogic_vs_zabbix Hope that helps your query!

I would bet that are the basic network and system commands of the Linux shell. Ping, nmap, sar, telnet,top, sysdig, etc the core over which nice web interface may be built, and are always dismissed but that in the end are the ultimate and simplest ways to detect and diagnose problems.

A new tool Anturis (http://www.anturis.com) which is very perspective because of its simplicity, all in one character and troubleshooting feature.

Zabbix is a little underrated, its distributed, native, works with Nagios plugins and SNMP, and has an advanced management and monitoring front end.

While Nagios is a popular pick, I'd recommend you take a look at this article,http://www.libertycenterone.com/blog/five-of-the-best-free-network-monitoring-software-tools/, which breaks down the pros and cons of several *free* networking monitoring programs. I prefer Zabbix because I find it more intuitive than others, but there's going to be pros and cons with whatever you choose.

I would check out RG System. They provide infrastructure monitoring as well as backup and all activity is displayed on a single easy to use dashboard. http://www.rg-systemes.com/en