Event log monitoring (how I sleep at night)

When I was first hired on as a Windows Server guy, I was initially tasked with getting Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) working in our environment. After much work, I felt MOM 2005 had some deal-breaking issues:

1. Event log alerts were only flagged with known alerts. This does not work well when services such as Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) have a new and undocumented alert every time they decide to stop working. At the time, a management agent was only provided by a third party and it still did not cover every critical event there was.
2. Disk space monitoring. By default, MOM expected every server to have the same free space needs (a percentage, or a hard value). Our servers had very different needs and trying to find one setting to fit all the servers simply didn't work. There was a solution written by some astute guys using vbs and custom settings per server, but it felt like a hack and the central management was no longer applicable.
3. Database management. MOM itself became a monster that required me to constantly tweak the database (due to the 1GB limitation) to keep it working. I would prefer to spend my resources on the production servers, not the watchdog.

I needed something that treated event management from the other direction: alert on all events except the ones I have predetermined to be benign. Also, the filtering needed to be unique per server. Disk space needed to have alert thresholds to also be unique per server and I needed to be able to do historical reporting on the servers so I could get an idea of when we would need to get more disk space.

The solution we found was Power Admin. It met our needs, the developers are approachable, and it seems our requests usually make it into the next version, which I find remarkable. Their pricing structure is very good, especially for SMB's who need to start small and add more servers as they go along.

I recommend their product highly. If you find that it meets your needs as well, drop me a comment and let me know. Thanks for reading.