Reminds me of a corporate finance class with the instructor determined to make sure you could recite the formulas. Sure, everyone knew which calculator button to push and in the order necessary to get the answer, but he was determined we should know the behind the keypad process in case we needed to calculate in a moment the return value or PI. Does the same theory apply here? If you work in consultancy, could you enter any company, without your favorite monitoring app, and tell them if "everythings OK"? Discuss the benefits of third party solutions, but ceasing to teach and reinforce the fundamentals would be a grave loss.