I'm looking for an open source application to perform a specific sort
of monitoring function.  This seems so basic, I'm betting there is
something like this that currently exists.

I currently monitor a group of unix boxes by logging into each of them
and running xload with the display exported back to my desktop.  Here
is a picture of what I am talking about:

http://www.iowni.com/storage/loads.gif

This works well enough, but what I really want is a web page that
anyone can visit that shows the same basic information.  So...  I'll
pay this finders fee to anyone who can point me towards a application
that:

1: Is free (as in beer) to use (preferably open source)
2: Can monitor Linux as well as Solaris clients.
3: Can consolidate multiple server statuses to a single web page.
4: Shows a HISTORY of the server load (I don't want a snapshot).

Thanks!

Hello Blackrock,

The product that is perhaps most close to what you asked for (free,
Linux / Solaris, single web page for several systems, history) is
Ganglia.
  http://ganglia.sourceforge.net/
I use Ganglia to monitor about 50 systems in five clusters, but the
references on the Ganglia site show it scales well to several hundred
systems.

For background, Ganglia has three main parts:
 - gmond - data collection daemon, runs on the systems to be
monitored; gmond can be set up to be "deaf" and only send data or can
act as redundant data collectors (in case a machine goes down).
 - gmetad - a daemon that polls the systems to be monitored and helps
collect (using rrdtool) the information. gmetad can poll gmond systems
or gmetad systems as well - again for redundancy.
 - web front end - a PHP application, I run it under Apache, to
generate the web pages

This is described in far more detail at
  http://ganglia.sourceforge.net/docs/
and in the documentation you get after download.

Another alternative is the Performance Copilot
  http://oss.sgi.com/projects/pcp/index.html
which announced Solaris support in February 2003. The data collection
is pretty comprehensive on Irix and Linux, but I haven't tried the
Solaris version. It does not have a web front end, but the GUI tools
on Irix (if you have a system available) are VERY nice. The pmie
(inference engine) tool is also capable of generating alarms or taking
various actions when conditions are detected. The archive / history
mechanism is pretty complete as well.

For other possibilities, I suggest searches such as:
  cluster performance measurement
  performance measurement solaris

If this answer does not fit the bill in ANY way or you need some more
alternatives, please make a clarification request.

  --Maniac

Ganglia looks like a perfect solution - I will investigate it further.