"Among the most fundamental and core pieces of software that can exist in a network infrastructure is software that can monitor the network itself.
"The market for network and IT monitoring tools is extremely competitive, with heavyweights, such as IBM Tivoli and HP OpenView commanding a lot of attention and dollars. In recent years there has also been an upsurge in open source alternatives, thanks in part to the success and adoption of tools like Nagios, which are freely available and accomplish basic network monitoring tasks..."
