Groundwork/Nagios and Rockstars

I've implemented Nagios at a few different places. In my current position, I've implemented Nagios with Groundwork, and I'm really happy with it. Groundwork provides a 'community' (free) version of their tool on a VM imaged instance that you can just plunk into a VM client. We use the npre_nt agents to monitor specific services and metrics on a number of windows servers. I reconfigured some of the vbscripts in the remote agents to call different methods in the WMI api which I've detailed in this forum. I've also customized the check_mssql to call specific tables looking for issues in production data (querying for held up business processes and corrupted documents). In order to do this, I had to download freetds and install it on the VM, overriding the default installation target with /usr/local/groundwork/. Then the freetds.conf file gets put into /usr/local/groundwork/etc and you can configure the servers you want to call in there. I put two configs for each server I wanted to call in that .conf file as I wanted to be able to test from the command line. I found that groundwork ends up calling using the IP of the box - so each server conf has a proper domain name config, and a IP name config.
One other thing about configuring the Groundwork/Nagios installation - I had to configure the CentOS to point to our exchange server so the email notifications would work.

I've read a couple of of good tech books lately (I now own them both). Release It! by Michael Nygard, and Secrets of Rockstar Programmers by Ed Burns.