i am currently trying to decide on a good network monitoring tool and am wondering what other people are using to monitor their networks. i need to monitor for various things, such as resource usage, services running, simple heartbeat, etc.

my network consists mainly of win2k machines, with some solaris 8 and red hat 7.2 machines and also cisco network components. since most all of my servers are compaq's, i have been using compaq's insight manager v7 for my network monitoring. doesn't seem to be a bad application, but does like to gobble up resources.

i have been looking at Alchemy-Labs "Alchemy-Eye 3.7" application (http://www.alchemy-lab.com/products/eye/), has anyone ever used this before? what did you think? it seems to have some nice functionality and additional plug-ins for added functionality.

thanks in advance for any suggestions you have.