Dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat and ifstat. Dstat overcomes some of their limitations and adds some extra features, more counters and flexibility. Dstat is handy for monitoring systems during performance tuning tests, benchmarks or troubleshooting.

Monitor all the usual stuff like processes, files, directories, disk space, etc. AND set up simple processes for restarting services or umounting partitions when they reach thresholds. The monit.conf syntax is very straight-forward. I like the way they haven’t added any useless complexity as just an attempt to make it look sophisticated. I currently use mrtg to monitor bandwidth utilization, cpu usage, and even disk space on a group of servers, and i’ve used cacti and nagios in the past, but monit is by far the easiest to get setup and running. Of the three, it’s definitely the quickest to setup with the least hassle. I gave up on nagios and all its plugins a long time ago, so maybe that project has been revamped, but I dont plan on trying it out again anytime soon.