BI Monitoring

I am new to SAP BI. Actually, we are still in blueprinting. One of my biggest concerns is monitoring BI process chains for failures and their overall performance. I have been rather disappointed in the out of the box views installed with the BI Administration Cockpit. How do you all do your monitoring? Do you mostly use the SAPGui? Do you use the BI Administration Cockpit? Have you created your own Cockpit? Do you have any automated alerts? Are their any good 3rd party tools for monitoring the BI system?

I hope you all can supply some good suggestions!