[thaumaturgy]

We use Nagios on one of our Linodes to do our server monitoring. It's set up to do nearly constant monitoring; the last time we had a glitch, I received a text message about high CPU load before the graph at Linode had even updated to show the spike.

That costs us $20/month, except we're doing it on a server that was already required for another service and had plenty of disk and CPU to spare, so ... really it costs us nothing, and gives us most of CloudKick's features, in our specific case.

Given their pricing, I think I'd rather take that money each month and pay someone to contribute to Nagios instead. :-/

[bobfunk]

We use Nagios combined with Ganglia for webpop.com as well and it's a great solution.

But if we weren't on a tight budget (we're bootstrapped) I would have gone with something like CloudKick no doubt.

The server for Nagios might be cheap, but installing, refining and updating our monitors does take time that could be used on developing our product instead.

[BCGC]

I think it depends on how many servers you monitor :)

$99 per month for 6 servers is really cool.