[Discuss] Solarwinds/Network Management?

[jim at gasek.net (Jim Gasek)]

Does anyone use Solarwinds network management?

Likes/Dislikes, scalability, ease of use, support
paradigm, cost vs. value?

What are most popular "network management" (SNMP) 
products in use, and are any free ones good?

Nagios? 

I've used and had pretty good experiences with
(freeware) Argus and Splunk.  

Up/Down monitoring is pretty easy to do with 
Argus, but SNMP with some root-cause analysis is 
certainly preferrable.

Is any open source product/utility taking off in large 
corporate environments?   Being promoted by resellers
or OEMs?   

I used to work for Cabletron SPECTRUM, a -long- time
ago. 

I'm looking for opinions for where the network management
industry is going.

Thanks,
Jim Gasek