It's funny that this post come up. I just slicked the Dell PowerEdge 2970 server today at work and reinstalled a fresh copy of Windows Server 2003 R2 64 Bit edition to make way for the "System Center Operation Manager 2007" deployment I am going to do. It's Microsofts predecessor to MOM 2005. I have looked into in and have evaluated what it can do and I am pretty impressed. It will give me a central location for monitoring everything in my environment from, all Security Logs from every server, to monitoring events logs, services, distrubuted applications such as Exchange, and SharePoint and any other Microsoft or Third-Party app. I can monitor SNMP devices as well such as switches, routers, pix firewalls, Client Machines and databases pretty much whatever. As for price point I couldn't tell you. The company I work for is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Something to look into if you ever find yourself a System Administrator of a large spread out environment.
