Linux Traffic Control, DNS ALG issue , and Service Monitoring

I am busy with a couple of interesting stuff that keeps me away from posting here.
First,
I am working on a linux box which is an internet gateway and controls traffic using iptable and at same time it acts as the inter VLAN router for around 10 VLANs using 802.1Q. I am trying to run some sort of QoS to put traffic control on every VLAN for their internet usage. And with Linux this will be easily done with a tool called TC.
I have expressed that before but it is worth to mention again that with linux we will get tons of outstanding networking features that gives us full control on our network and what is running behind the scene on the wires! I am really impressed!!!
Second,
My firewall is not handling DNS ALG as expected so it has brought us some disturbance. Everything is fine with outside to inside regular DNS queries but when a DNS query for PTR record comes in, DNS ALG does not translate the IP address in the response payload while it does so when it comes to Forward queries. According to RFC 2694 this should work unless our Firewall is not RFC compliant. I am documenting the issue regarding RFC to send it over to our Firewall Vendor.
Third,
I was studying available service monitoring tools to monitor our IDC services and servers and nearly reached to the conclusion to implement "ManageEngine Applications Monitror" and I already have a pilot server in place. I will post on it later.