load average and some built-in monitoring mechanism

[Zbigniew Szalbot]

Hi there,

My machine has recently been taken down by (most likely) runaway java
process. The box had to be rebooted as there was no remote access to
it but I am not able to find anything useful in logs to confirm
whether it was java. Is there a tool that would enable me to
automatically turn on verbose logging of top processes to some file
once the load average is greater than the specified value? This way,
once the storm is over, I would be able to see which process(es) went
nuts.

I guess a tool like that may simply already exist in which case I'd
appreciate links/more information. How are you dealing with such
issues when/if they happen to you?

Many thanks!

-- 
Zbigniew Szalbot
www.slowo.pl
www.fairtrade.net.pl