[gentoo-user] Re: How to record memory usage & bandwidth usage?

[James <wireless@tampabay.rr.com>]

Pandu Poluan <pandu <at> poluan.info> writes:


> The head honcho of my company just asked me to "plan for migration of
> X into the cloud" (where "X" is the online trading server that our
> investors used).

This is a single server or many at different locations.
If a WAN monitoring is what you are after, along with individual
server resources, you have many choices.

> Now, I need to monitor how much RAM is used throughout the day by X,
> also how much bandwidth gets eaten by X throughout the day.

Most of the packages monitor ram as well as other resource utilization
of the servers, firewall, routers and other SNMP devices in your network.
some experimentation may be warranted to find what your team likes best.

> What tools do you recommend?

OH boy. I like JFFNMS very very much. It has a very old version in portage
(masked) but a very new version out there for Debian and Ubuntu. It 
runs on all nix, if you want to driectly compile and install.

I'll be putting together a new ebuild, as soon as I get it working
with the latest postgresql. Mysql works out of the box. Postgresql-9
has many new and very cool features.

> Remember: The data will be used for 'post-mortem' analysis, so I don't
> need any fancy schmancy presentation. Just raw data, taken every N
> seconds.

Personally, I have some large, high risk design work going on. JFFNMS
and pg9 are the best choices from my research. A whiz like yourself
could easily look at the old JFFNMS ebuild and create a new one.
PG-9 (please no flame wars on mysql vs pg9) is very cool and what
my work is migrating too, once I get some breathing room.

Craig at jffnms.org is very cool and responsive. He also works closely
with those that submit patches. Nagios is a large, disorder array that
had many devs fork off since the project leader (was/is an a_ole)
is quite difficult to work with.

JFFNMS rules and is very cool for managing cisco and other routers,
not to mention a myriad of snmp(1,2.3) devices and all types
of servers. The original guy, Javier, was snapped  up by someone
worth billions, to manage and extend his financial network, but, Craig
is probably stronger coder, and extraordinarily nice human being.
It's mostly php. Lots of folks extend JFFNMS, Craig keeps it clean
and well written and documented code.

http://www.jffnms.org/

hth,
James