Monitoring OSPF Neighbor State Changes

I got into a conversation today about monitoring OSPF neighbor state changes so I thought I'd talk about it a little here and ask all of you if this is something that you're specifically interested in.

As most of you know, OSPF is the most commonly deployed Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) within medium and large enterprises today. When managing an OSPF network, one of the most important things to monitor is changes to the OSPF neighbor states. This is exactly what it sounds like - monitoring how each router within the OSPF network sees other routers within the network. Some of these state changes are a normal part of the operation of OSPF, but many times a state change is indicative of a problem on the network. There are several ways to monitor these state changes, but typically it's done with either SNMP based polling and/or SNMP traps.

A really good reference for learning more about OSPF neighboring can be found here:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk365/technologies_tech_note09186a0080093f0e.shtml

Is this something that you monitor today? If so, how? If not, would you like to?

Flame on...
Josh