Maybe not applicable to everyone, but for those with network monitoring needs, the folks in Australia at Lithium Corp. are showing a nice commercial client-server network monitoring system.

What's the big deal? There are a ton of these and most of them are free?

Well, this one has an XML-based API between the client and the server and it looks gorgeous! They have dedicated Mac and PC programmers working on the UI (no java hack), and they've got a great start.

Now, it's still not a replacement for a lot of the stuff you need to do, but they claim to be moving in the right direction. It has a ticketing system, excellent links between the ticketing and the monitoring, "virtual rack" visualization, and some beautiful displays.

No guarantees, but the guy that I was talking to at their booth knew well the need to preserve real data (as opposed to smoothed data), the interest in stuff like Dashboard Widgets for at-a-glance status checks, multi-server coordination, nagios plug-ins, and a public API.

Keep an eye on these guys.

Oh, a note on pricing, they're per-device and it's along the lines of 2-15$AU for each device (not to be confused with per-sensor like some people) and their enterprise version starts off with 25 of them in the price.