[wellylug] How to monitor CPU/Memory/Disk usage

Abhinav Keswani abhinav.keswani at gmail.com
Wed Apr 6 15:37:33 NZST 2005


Hi,

Depending on what you specifically want to achieve, IMHO there a few
things you can do here...

1. To warn about potential trouble:  use something like nagios or
opennms or big brother to warn upon breaching some threshold settings,
e.g. disk space > 85% on /var filesystem => send SMS/email alert. 
[You can also do funky things like keep asset registers and records of
when thresholds were reached, who was using them...useful for service
desk call reporting]

2. To monitor performance in the long term:  use a blend of snmp and
mrtg(or cricket which I have heard is very good but not used it
myself) to get quite comprehensive logging of how a host is using its
resources...and when it is using them...

3. use a combination of the above to achieve something that warns of
problems and monitors performance (ie. you can set warning thresholds
within mrtg if you want to).

I personally have used BB, net-snmp and mrtg combo quite extensively
and have toyed with opennms.  I can help you with some configs off
line if you would like...

In the meantime check this out for a pretty solid start to using mrtg
+ net-snmp with linux
http://212.179.48.82/howto/mrtg/

I would compile mrtg and net-snmp from source...you'll need to grab
some specific libs if you want to draw nice graphs for performance e.g
libpng...

-Abhinav

> >> I'm a little worried that my 'mail server' PC is getting overloaded
> >> and I
> >> am losing emails etc., or that I am having delays in outgoing mail.
> >> How can I set up some sort of monitoring to look at CPU, memory and disk
> >> usage - preferably in a graphical format.
> >> I seem to recall that cricket and/or mrtg might be able to do this but
> >> searching around has not shown me any way to monitor a local PC's
> >> stats -
> >> can anyone point me in the right direction?
> >> I'd like to be able to do this on Debian and Gentoo as there are a
> >> couple
> >> of other PCs I'd like to be able to monitor as well.




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