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• Nagios: For availability monitoring. When a service or host goes down, we know about it. Was put in place when we discovered one of our pairs of firewalls (hot standby) had silently failed over because of a faulty hdd, and we hadn't noticed it for 2 days.
• Cacti: For throughput and performance monitoring. Makes pretty little graphs. The best thing about it is that it helps bypass the complex configuration of rrdtool by using templates. Documentation on creating new, non-standard graphs could use some work.

Both tools give us a much better view of our network, and what our various devices are doing.

Not sure how helpful this will be in huge environments, I live in the small to midsize market, but here are some tools that I have found useful in the past:
Not exactly a monitoring tool, but definitely the most versatile all around auditor I have ever found: Nessus.
Ettercap is a good sniffer.
The MRTG tool has been a godsend when I have had managed devices to deal with, and I have heard very good things about the RRD tool and Cacti.
Tripwire is freely available for Linux and the BSDs, though the Win32 version has not been open-sourced.
One tool I have not been able to find in F/OSS is a Windows event log monitor (though believe me I'm still looking).

Well, don't forget it as much as get something better, Cacti. Cacti is a frontend to MRTG & RRDTOOL and offers a lot of awesome improvements, such as a web frontend to add devices, device "profiles" to enable a common monitoring set for things such as Cisco routers, servers, etc and a whole lot more. We used MRTG here at our (Windows only) network, and I'm slowly moving it all over to Cacti for all of the above plus a lot more.

I run wifibox instead of Sveasoft. Its GPL compliant and has SNMP. Hmmmm, pretty graphs.

I've been playing with MRTG a little lately...I wonder if you could have Apache or other processes provide info via SNMP and use or modify MRTG to provide more 3-d and 4-d (brightness like VisitorVille's lit/unlit buildings or color) 'graphs'?

You should look at a free product called Cacti. It uses RRDTool (from the maker of MRTG) to generate graphs of anything. Literally, anything you can script in Perl or Bash to return a variable when the script is run can be graphed. It's very powerful, and free too, which can't be beat.

No, I'm not the project developer, I just use it at work and find it quite a bit better than many commercial products that do the same thing.

That is what I use Nagios and Cacti.

The RRD home page has links to TONS of other tool sthat make use of it and SNMP.

pretty pictures are more fun to look at! Check out cacti for all of your process/bandwidth/load/usage graphing needs. It's available at raxnet.net

I've been extremely impressed with Cacti for statistic monitoring. It can be found at: http://www.raxnet.net/products/cacti/ It's quite easy to set up, and for larger sites, it has an excellent user privilege system.

I had good experience with the following tools: cacti
It's based on RRD the successor of MRTG (not much developed anymore, but still a good tool). Thanks Tobi btw.
OpenNMS is a really powerful realtime monitoring tool
Nagios also...
Don't forget snort for your IDS needs and add acidlab for good visualization of snort's results.

You can try Cacti. It's a web interface in PHP built around MySQL and RRDtool, the much more flexible successor to the flexible-as-hell MRTG. A friend just showed it to me yesterday, and I'm playing now. Looks very very nice. Homepage for Oetikers RRDTool is here