With bare metal, you just have to roll your own monitoring. Primarily, only buy what you can work with easily. Mainly, esure raid monitoring can be scripted,

With bare metal, you just have to roll your own monitoring. Primarily, only buy what you can work with easily. Mainly, esure raid monitoring can be scripted, and you really need not depend upon the manufacturer's horrid software (which I agree is just that). A bit of IPMI for failed power supplies, or what not. If a box dies, it dies, that's what failover is for. I don't your logging complain, you need it no matter what you do. Just use an rsyslog server, logcheck or other app, monitor for important events, done. I've never used anything off the shelf, and yet all I hear are complaints from those that do. I get how people might want to eschew the above for simple stuff, but once you start needing heavy monitoring, it's all the same ball of wax.