I'm often asked to to supply quantative data to suits. 90% of the time they don't actually care, so I stopped trying. Instead I just grab instance data and I graph it. And the suits love it. I've done graphs for mail spools, ups load, and of course all the bandwidth stats, etc., etc.

The tool I use called CACTI, and uses RRD tool to do the graphing. If you can write a script that returns some numbers, cacti can handle it. Alas it's not perl.

Cacti is available here.

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TTFN, FNORD

xaphod