Your second point (monitoring of your monitoring tools) is a very key point for this particular example. I've seen many people through together a quick install

Your second point (monitoring of your monitoring tools) is a very key point for this particular example. I've seen many people through together a quick install of WhatsUP or Nagios or whatever, then get caught with their pants down months later when they find their monitoring server's been down for days and they didn't know it.