Well, too bad that you've never heard of it. In most of my past jobs it was used as a monitoring tool (besides nagios). It's really great (and writing own plugins in perl is fun), and I can only say on debian I do "aptitude install munin munin-node munin-plugins-extra" and then activate the plugins for mysql und apache and I'm done.
Of course if you're totally new to munin then it might take you longer than the 15 minutes. And yes, you have to be root (I don't know if it's possible to run it as a normal user, some of the values it queries might only be available to root). So, no munin, ok. I mean you don't have to. You could use the tool you like best =)
Still, if you need help with configuring munin, just ask. I'm also in irc.perl.org

In reply to Re^3: PerlMonks Caching (munin) by tinita
in thread PerlMonks Caching by ahmad

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