Visualizing system performance with MRTG
PICTURES
MRTG generates simple graphs for viewing network performance at a glance.
Linux admins often benefit from capturing system performance metrics such as disk utilization, CPU usage, and memory usage. A handy performance chart helps in diagnosing problems and analyzing traffic issues. Multi-Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) lets you collect and graph network and performance data from Linux hosts. MRTG is an open source graphing tool that collects and displays statistics from SNMP-based network devices.
Commercial tools, such as HP’s Open- View or IBM’s Tivoli, as well as open source utilities, such as Cacti and Zenoss (a beefed-up version of MRTG), serve a similar role, but in my opinion, MRTG is the best solution for trending and collecting server performance data.
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