Zabbix is growing on me more and more now. I dont think the learning curve is any worse than Nagios or Cacti, it’s just different.
I am using zabbix-1.6.2 to auto-discover devices across two sites. Mainly snmp devices and zabbix-agent devices. Everything else gets lumped into the workstation catagory unless specified otherwise.
I can monitor data via ipmi too but am yet to work out how to control servers manually via ipmi.
But one of the unique features has to be monitoring of web services. Testing loging into a self hosted website making sure a page or two return as expected and monitoring the response time and download speed.
There is not much need for me to post any tutorials on zabbix as most of it is in the zabbix manual. Just be sure to jump to the quick start guide for a quick reference.