Product: collectd
From http://directory.fsf.org/project/collectd/ :
'collectd' is a small daemon which collects system information every 10 seconds and writes the results in an RRD-file. The statistics gathered include: CPU and memory usage, system load, network latency (ping), network interface traffic, and system temperatures (using lm-sensors), and disk usage. 'collectd' is not a script; it is written in C for performance and portability. It stays in the memory so there is no need to start up a heavy interpreter every time new values should be logged.
From the collectd website:
Collectd gathers information about the system it is running on and stores this information. The information can then be used to do find current performance bottlenecks (i. e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i. e. capacity planning). Or if you just want pretty graphs of your private server and are fed up with some homegrown solution you're at the right place, too ;).
While collectd can do a lot for you and your administrative needs, there are limits to what it does:
* It does not generate graphs. It can write to RRD-files, but it cannot generate graphs from these files. There's a tiny sample script included in contrib/, though. Also you can have a look at drraw for a generic solution to generate graphs from RRD-files.
* It does not do monitoring. The data is collected and stored, but not interpreted and acted upon. There's a plugin for Nagios, so it can use the values collected by collectd, though.
It's reportedly a reliable product that doesn't cause a lot load on your system. This enables you to collect data at a faster rate so you can detect problems earlier.
