This is not ment to be an easy assignment, but it should be interesting. What I am looking for is a software package that can gather statistics on several resources accross several machines. Resources should include cpu utilization, disk usage, memory, and network usage. This information should be gathered from several machines (both Linux and Solaris) and displayed in a nice format (graphs, charts, pretty pictures) suitable for a web page. The information should be able to be gathered for a long time if need be (say a week or so).
This would be something that sysadmins would use to get a good baseline of their system. Something that would provide useful information that could then be compared to when things go wrong.
Feel free to utilize existing software for parts of this assignment (like getting network statistics or whatnot), but don't just hand in a copy of bigbrother or spong. I want you to develop your own package.
This assignment is due by the start of the fall semester. Feel free to contact me to look at your progress and give comments.