[wplug] Linux/unix server monitoring tools

[Mark Dalrymple]

A friend of mine asked me today:

(Big Organization) has an in-house tool used for monitoring CPU usage,
run queue, wait io, etc. for its Solaris and AIX servers. Since we're
using some of the first linux machines in the Big Organization,
they've just now discovered porting this to linux will require a
non-trivial amount of work due to differences in how the linux kernel
stores these data.

So, while they're working on that port, we're looking for a
reasonable alternative. which is where you come in.

Does anybody have any recommendations for systems that can provide
this sort of information? The preferred architecture is to have
data-gathering clients run on each machine with a central server to
collect and display in a spiff web UI.

Any folks have a favorite tool they use?  (someone pointed me to
http://www.nagios.org/ already)

Thanks,
++Mark Dalrymple, markd at badgertronics.com.  http://badgertronics.com
  "Bus' a move, we sho` improve, hey yo Doug, do that record jam on the groove"
     -- Doug E. Fresh (and the Get Fresh Crew)