Q:

Monitoring SharePoint 2010 farm

I'm assigned to monitoring our SharePoint 2010 intranet environment. 
I want to know about best practices for that and if there is any tool our checklist for this task. 
Thank you

A:

SharePoint is a bundle of services.   If you already have a tool for monitoring other servers (SCOM, Solar Winds, etc) you can use that for SharePoint as well.   What to monitor depends on your own needs and SLA/OLA requirements.   
You may get away with just monitoring the basic services in windows and making sure the machines are on.   Or you may be required to actually pull down an HTTP request to make sure a page is responding as expected.   These are very specific requirements per organization.  The more you monitor the more work there is managing those monitors.   
If you know nothing about SharePoint, and have to monitor it I would suggest first getting to know and understand the servers.   Log in to each every day and check the logs and services, get to know what is running, which log entries are normal, and which ones need to be addressed.   Find out what's being used on the system (just web viewing, search, other application services, etc) to determine what you should be watching and declare critical.  
But that all being said pay special attention to the SQL server, that and permissions will most likely make up the majority of causes for issues you will see.