I'm sure there are lots of examples of computing environments with "bursty" demand. For example, I once attened a talk by someone from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) about the unique demands of capturing and logging data from atomic research experiments: the event of interest (typically, a particle collision ...
Our CEO, Ranga Rangachari, made me aware of the following web page where Stanford Linear Accelerator lists the IT Monitoring (mostly, Network Monitoring) tools they use. It's a great summary page for anyone looking to get a start in this area, but I don't see any evaluation or assessment:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/nmtf/nmtf-tools.html ...