on my neverending searchtrip on the wild wild web i fortunately came across this very well made article which i want to share here.

Building Linux Monitoring Portals with Open Source

Faced with an increasing number of deployed Linux servers and no budget for commercial monitoring tools, our company looked into open-source solutions for gathering performance and security information from our Unix environment. There are many open-source monitoring packages to choose from, including Big Sister and Nagios to name a few. Though some of these try to provide an all-in-one solution, I knew we would probably end up combining a few tools to obtain the metrics we were looking for. This article is meant to give a general overview of the steps in building a monitoring solution. Take a look at the demo here which is a scaled down model of our production monitoring portal.

read the whole shebang here

have fun