Just curious what everyone uses for network monitoring. I've mainly used SNMPc, SolarWinds Orion and Engineer's Toolset. And a bit of NetMRI.

Would love to know what "secret" MIB's you've found useful to monitor. I.E. CPU Temperature status etc...

Nagios for paging, and a lot of custom scripts to generate and manage MRTG/RRDtool configurations to handle the rest. Then routers.cgi on top of MRTG.

I run MRTG cfgmaker daily to generate configurations for new interfaces added to the network. I could never get anything automated like this out of Cacti (which doesn't have the best interface indexing options) and gave up on it. cfgmaker has a create template feature that lets you pipe via perl templates to output custom configurations per-interface (thresholds), and per-device (CPU/temp/etc).

It isn't really 'secret' but monitoring border interfaces with packet counters (PPS) has been useful for scaling our network with hardware-switched platforms.