Years ago by a forgotten party, I was introduced to a piece of software for monitoring Linux systems; it’s name is Munin. What Munin does is to analyse all sorts of system logs for important attributes, and graph them for you. If you’re running a Linux distribution there’s a good chance there will be a Munin package available. With almost no setup work, you can have a nice graphical layout of many important attributes of your system. Besides the default processes that are represented, there are also a number of plugins that can be easily introduced. Even if you have a system monitoring service installed, I highly suggest giving Munin a shot, it’s free, and easy to add. You can take a look at a default monitoring installation of one of my systems here.