Don will talk about cricket.
Cricket is a high performance, extremely flexible system for monitoring trends in time-series data. In other words: it makes lots of pretty graphs that make it easier to understand what’s been going on with your servers and/or network. It’s really good at getting data via SNMP, but if you can get some number out of something automatically you can get cricket to graph it.
Here’s an example graph; Sonoma State’s primary internet connection traffic over the past year:
Can you tell which week’s classes were in session?
Or, how about the usage levels of workstations in a computer lab (in the wisconsin CS dept):