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There's a good post over at the IT Garage comparing commercial systems management/monitoring applications to open source ones. The comparison isn't really about any particular product, rather it goes over things you want to do with such applications, and compares an open source model to a commercial one.

It's also another good addition to the DIY IT talk that's been going around, e.g.,

The first lesson I took away from this episode was some thinking about who the "you" is in Do-It-Yourself IT. It could refer to the IT organization itself: represented by its management. Or, as in this case, it could refer to the system administrators and programmers on the front lines. In this case, the existence of Nagios empowered the SA to solve the problem without escalating to management levels that could authorize the money or contract terms to expedite the commercial solution. This presages a shift in the decision authority between IT management and IT technicians -- as well a shift in the balance of power between the vendor and the customer. The people who are doing the work have a greater say in how it gets done.