EXPERT RESPONSE
As an engineer, my favorite answer in the world is, "it depends." I can certainly recommend some great Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) performance monitoring tool sets based on the email you sent. If you just want to monitor management information base (MIB) that provide statistics based on hardware, software services, and interface data, then go with an SNMP performance monitor.
There are a ton of them on the market that have a wide variety of features that you may want to pay attention to. Caveat emptor, however. There are a lot of good products on the market that are priced well and provide the basic functionality that most customers would need. This would include What's Up Gold by IpSwitch or Solar Winds. Both of these software packages provide free software trials that you can test out.
For larger organizations, the necessity to pay for larger, more scalable solutions exist. These include HP's OpenView, Concord's eHealth Concord's e Health Suite, and the NetQoS NetVoyant solution. For larger enterprises, major projects drive the solution as far as creating visibility for global deployments, being able to threshold and baseline SNMP statistics, proactive alerting, and far more robust reporting.
It all depends based on what you're trying to accomplish. If you want the basics with a wide variety of devices, choose a product that supports the devices you want to monitor, start small and then grow.
View more network monitoring tool resources:
 Read open source network monitoring and management tools news.
See which network tools monitor all OSI layers in this response with network management, monitoring and analysis expert Craig Thomas.
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