need the best way to monitor in real time my servers

1) cpu usage
2) network card usage


we have a chat system running that ceilings at 1000 users. trying to monitor my servers to see if the problem is on the server side, or the apps side. any help? thnx

1 - "top" command can show some info about cpu usage.
2 - actually i dont know what tool can show real time network card usage. u may search softwares from freshmeat.net , if u find a sofware or a tool for real time net card usage, please let me know.

For network usage you could use ntop
There is a very complete webinterface whit more options and info than you can imagine, but there is also a small console-version, similair to top.
(thisone is called intop, by the way)
http://www.ntop.org/ntop.html

MRTG seems to do the job. Not real time but updated every 5 minutes. I suppose you could set it to update every 2 mins but...

I have it set up to monitor (in graph form), server cpu usage, total free memory, real free memory, open TCP connections, local LAN usage through server/gateway and ADSL usage to internet. There are quite a few other things you can monitor like temp, all types of memory usage (total real and swap), etc.

It comes installed with Redhat apache install (I think...), you just have to set it up. You will need to install SNMP to use MRTG.

Only negative I found was the lack of help docs. but once set up it is worth it.

i've never used MRTG before. will it help me see if my network card is being maxed out, and that this is causing my ceiling in my apps preformance.

1) QUICK FIX: it would be nice if there was just a straight forward way to check in real time the % being used on my network card, so as i do my test runs i can see if a bottle neck is occuring on the network card. (is there a log somewhere i could check? can MRTG show me real time percentages and i just don't know it?)

2) LONG RUN: i also need a nice overall monitoring system, like the examples everybody is giving right now.....maybe MRTG is that system. it definitly looks interesting. any body else use it? what all do you monitor with it? is there a better system out there?

For realtime you would probably be better with GKrellM. It runs well and gives all the stats you want. I'm actually working on a Nagios plugin that interfaces with a GKrellM server to monitor tempertatures/fan speeds/activity etc.

note: guys who are offering examples of monitors you use. i run rh 7.3 and only command line. so i need something i can interact with using commandline...or something that will produce a web page i can check....or something where a client can run on my pc. thnx guys.

If you want to monitor network usage I recommend IPTraf. It gives you a detailed view of every connection on you system, it also give you nice statistical information like average speed, total packets sent/recieved, etc ...
IPTraf : http://iptraf.seul.org/

As for CPU usage top is nice.

MRTG is configurable from command line

It will give you percentages for current, average and max Eth0 (or other) in kb or mb. It will give you the same specs (C,A & M) for CPU usage in percentage. It will also give you these results in graphs in for usage daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. The daily graph is averaged from data collected at 5 minute intervals (quite accurate enough I have found), the weekly graph is calculated from averages of 30 mins and so on....

It produces webpages in redhat that can be seen with a default setting at www.mydomain.com/mrtg/cpu_usage1.html (or whatever you set the page names to).

Do a google for MRTG you will see plenty of graphs that are publicly viewable on servers around the place.

mrtg is good for checking interface traffice "in" and "out" graphicall. Not very diffiuct to configre MRTG.

if you wana remote access your server use ssh or if you have window system then use "PuTTy" .
few command to check cpu usage "top" for memory "free"

Below is the link to configure mrtg on your server. Remember MRTG is only for monitoring traffice on your interfaces.

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/we...nix-guide.html

gkrellm can be run locally on a non-x system and pipes its gui to another....I monitor my servers from my freebsd desktop that way.