[ Thanks to Falko
Timme for this link. ]
“munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect
of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL
throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas
monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL,
Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it
finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the
two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize
current or upcoming problems (like “We need a bigger server soon,
our load average is increasing rapidly.”), and a watchdog that
ensures the availability of the monitored services.“Although munin lets you monitor more than one server, we will
only discuss the monitoring of the system where it is installed
here.“This tutorial was written for Debian Squeeze, but the
configuration should apply to other distributions with little
changes as well. “