I’ve realized that it is probably a good idea to have some sort of healthcheck software for our servers. We have been using logcheck for months now and it is a nice tool for reporting abnormal system behavior. However, I wanted something graphical that keeps track of network and system related information for an extended period, like in- and outgoing traffic, cpu usage and so on.

MRTG does a nice job and wasn’t to complicated to install. You need an snmp server that is polling your data on a regular basis and a bit of mrtg config file voodoo. The gentoo wiki contains a usable HowTO.

I’ve also used the opportunity to install mailgraph which gathers statistics of the in- and outgoing smtp traffic. In case you are wondering, why the spam and virus counts do not work: you need to enable syslogging for amavisd-new.