I do perform bidirectional monitoring, for much the same reason that Alen mentioned - there was no template, set of expectations, or much of anything else when I put our system in place. We have tons of inside and outside-facing applications but had zero visibility into how these applications performed (or didn't) when I came aboard. I use a couple of WPM monitors to perform vanilla Web transactions to the outside world as ammo if I have to prove to our ISP (managed router - gah) that things aren't as they should be. Add strong Netflow/sFlow collection and I now have a good picture of what's traversing, exiting and entering the network at any given moment without a hassle. I evangelize about this info every chance I get - and am making new friends among our applications group all the time because of it. Good stuff.
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