OSS network monitoring

[phishphreek]

Since we don't have our new networking forum yet, I'll post this here. (well, I didn't see it yet anyway)

Ok, I've just brought up a new network and now I'm thinking bout a solution to monitor all of the sites and services. In the past, I have used numera's network monitor... but I don't really like it and it doesn't do everything that I'd want.

I want to build my own solution and be able to build on it as I need.

I'm thinking Nagios for the network link status and alerting. I will expand this later to include various servers and their services.

Then I'm going between MRTG and Cacti for the bandwith monitoring (netflow). I may setup both to see how I like it.

We're talking ~15 sites linked via partial star/partial mesh topology, mostly checkpoint and cisco gear (firewalls, routers, switches, callmanager+unity). The primary WAN links range from 10Mb to 100Mb. The LAN links range from 100Mb to 1000Mb. I will be monitoring both Windows and Linux servers. Services may include things such as vpn, ssh, active directory, dns, dhcp, http(s), smtp, file/print, and even specialized services that may just listen on a nonstandard ports that common only to my environment.

Right now, I've allocated a server with dual 3.2ghz processors, 2gb ram and 2 80Gig SATA drives setup in a RAID1 array. I can increase memory if needed, and I have access to more network storage if needed.

I think I'm going to go with OpenSuSE as the OS. I was initally going to use Fedora7, but their latest release is only on DVD and unfortunately, my server has no DVD drive and I don't feel like messing with it in a rackmount.

Can anyone recommend any other *nix/open source solution that may be of interest to me? Or, toss out some ideas that you'd like to see in your network monitoring solution or features that I may not have thought about?
I've been browsing around wiki and I've found some REALLY cool projects.

My initial goal is to just get the network monitoring/alerting up and running as well as traffic stats/graphing. Then I'll slowly add on the other services.