"The collectd project is designed for repeatedly collecting
information about your systems. While the tarball includes a Web
interface to analyse this information, the project says this
interface is a minimal example and cites other projects such as
Cacti for those who are looking for a Web interface to the
information gathered by collectd.
"There are collectd packages for Debian Etch, Fedora 9, and as a
1-Click for openSUSE. The application is written in C and is
designed to run as a daemon, making it a low overhead application
that is capable of logging information at short intervals without
significant impact on the system."