System administration question

[Norberto Meijome]

On Sat, 18 Mar 2006 14:19:34 -0600 (CST)
Philip Hallstrom <freebsd at philip.pjkh.com> wrote:

> > Is there a port or utility that allows you to monitor system stats
> > by (either interactively or periodically) reading the various stat
> > utilities (fstat, iostat, pstat or swapinfo, systat, top, vmstat,
> > etc.) and sending a report to root that summarizes system condition?
> 
> if you want graphs (of historical data) most apps seem to use
> rrdtool.  I find this page to be useful in looking at the available
> options...
> 
> http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/rrdworld/index.en.html

Give cacti a try (http://www.cacti.net) . it uses, mainly, SNMP to
contact your devices and poll information to your cacti box (i.e., you
dont have to run another DB or displays on your server). It plots the
data using rrd. It can also plot data coming out of your own scripts
(i.e., plot number of tuples in a view in your postgreSQL db...)

It may be a little bit overkill for just one server, but graphing for 5
or 10 isnt't goint to be that much harder once you have it set up.

Beto