Thoughts form anyone on any of this?
Network monitoring is not trivial no matter what tool you use. Pick something that you trust to scale to the proportions you will need so you don't do a lot of work and then hit a wall. And if you have a lot of systems, avoid anything that needs per-system configuration or agent installation.
Agreed. I'm definitely not looking for trivial - just trying to make sure I understand the strengths and weaknesses of each system to help me make the right decision. Because once I've made that decision, I have to live with it :-) Our environment is relatively small. About 80 servers that are mostly grouped into 3 compute clusters for the scientists I support. A few switches, and no routers under my direct control (though a few Linux boxes routing between NICs since some of the environment is on our own private LAN behind said Linux box, cut off from the Hospital's network)
cheers, -Alan