Questions[untagged](server)

Can you recommend any alternatives to Nagios, capable of monitoring both Linux and Windows computers and having an extensible architecture? I would like free products, but commercial ones could also be acceptable.

I am interested in monitoring CPU load, memory load, swapping, running processes, running services as I intend to use the software for performance monitoring. I would also like the monitoring plugins to be able to generate events when a certain threshold is exceed for a period of time and to pass data to external application (custom event handler functionality).

I do not know yet the deployment scenario, therefore having a relatively small footprint and being able to run on a regular computer with little performance impact is a plus (monitor just the host).

I'd like to start a collection of good, free cheat sheet resources for system administrators. Please add your favorite ones. From the Wikipedia "cheat sheet" article:

In more general usage, a "cheat sheet" is any short (one or two page) reference to terms, commands, or symbols where the user is expected to understand the use of such terms etc but not necessarily to have memorized all of them.

Based on “Organizational issues” — sore spots of IT? I think it would be fair to say that system administrators need to determine if a place is worth working at. There is a similar well known test by Joel for programmers.

What are the 12 questions system administrators should ask at an interview in order to help them decide if it's a good place to work at?

Following Joel's rules:

1. Questions should be platform and technology agnostic
2. Questions should elicit a simple response such as yes or no

EDIT: Please post one question at a time so we can see what users are voting for.

This is a Canonical Question about System Administration Careers

When I start my job as System Administrator, what basics skills should I know/learn?

Are there any key differences for Network, Storage, Database, and other Administrators?

Possible Duplicate:
What are the Sysadmin-Related Blogs & Mailing Lists you monitor?

Are there any great IT blogs out there?

Which would you recommend from basic to advance stuff?