I'm working on a new monitoring system because I can't find one that solves enough of my problems. It's going to be free and have an unrestricted open source license.

I could use your help.

At this stage, the best way you can help is to make sure I get lots of data about various infrastructure architectures, monitoring needs, reporting needs, alerting needs.

If you can, please share with me the following:

• A description (or diagram) of your infrastructure including network, servers, services, storage, etc.
• What you are using now for monitoring (can be any number of tools)
  • Why you like them
  • Why you don't like them
  • What you'd rather have, if anything
• What tools are missing that you wish existed?
• Would more documentation on monitoring, in general, help?
• Do you carry a pager? If not, why not? If so, what does it support? (email, sms, html email, mobile web, normal web)
• Would more documentation help?
  • Better documentation on how to monitor the things you need to monitor, such as best practices, better tool docs, etc?
  • Best practices for monitoring various scenarios?

Any thoughts, please email me jls-calmon@semicomplete.com - I'll be collecting this data into my design document, which you can view in unfinished form, here: Current Design Doc