Forrester: - Making Leaders Successful Every Day

At some point in time in the life of a growing IT organization, the question of monitoring the distributed infrastructure is bound to arise. Whether it's a shift from a mainframe-centric infrastructure or the result of a growing business, there is a critical point at which staff skills alone are no longer enough to manage incidents and problems. At that stage, the choice is to either go with one of the four major vendors, guaranteeing that all the future management needs will be covered, or to use a best-of-breed solution for the problem at hand, which leaves the future questions open. Usually, best-of-breed solutions, while limited in scope, cost less in terms of license and installation (the beer part), but they don't "integrate" easily with other complementary solutions to provide an overall effective IT management scheme (the champagne part). In reality, a combination of process and technology may help overcome this integration hurdle and provide cheap, but excellent, champagne.