I know I’ve mentioned how much I love the sysstat package before. I use sar regularly to help with performance diagnostics (Analyzing Linux System Performance And Finding Bottle Necks, CPU Performance Analysis In Linux, Baseline Analysis Is Important, CPU Performance Analysis In Linux Revisited). I wrote this little Nagios plugin to collect the performance metrics that sar collects.
I use this plugin with Zenoss and I set any performance thresholds there, more important to me was collecting the information for historical graphing. I searched around and didn’t really find any existing solutions thats why anyone wanting to do similar perhaps with cacti is stuck with my craptastic code (or please point me to a better implementation). Anyway if you want to grab the plugin and check it out its on github.