Its ironic that I googled for a solution to Netcool probes for EMOS (we need lots) and I found a response I sent on a Netcool User forum 3 years ago asking the same thing!) The licensing model is cost prohibitive with very large networks - SDH Element Managers such as EMOS have a span of control of ~250 elements and on big networks such as Colt it is not unheard of to have >100 element managers. An EMOS Probe is a band C probe @ ~20K GBP so you can see the issues. Most of this deployed equipment is pretty static, and will be repalced by NGN infrastructure at some time, but that won't happen for quite a while

I'm 2 and a bit weeks into my first contract as a freelancer. Enjoying it immensely, and the work is really interesting.

I've been doing some research on Set Top box Monitoring solutions for part of a project I'm working on. There seems to be very little in the way of commercial solutions I've found.