Ideas for landscape-sysinfo tool

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

Hello everyone,

I'm one of the developers working on the Landscape project at
Canonical[1].  Recently we've started working on a tool, so far named
landscape-sysinfo, which will be used to display some dynamic
information next to the MOTD message during logins.

The goal of this tool is to provide the administrator a basic overview
of how the system is running.  To give a basic feeling of what it is
about, a rough mockup follows.  Please note that we don't even know
yet which of these details will be available, and how they will be
actually worded.

    System load:  1.15     Processes:       1500
    Memory usage: 65%      Temperature:     74 C
    Swap usage:   None     Users logged on: 1 (you)

    => Zombie processes were found alive.
    => Disk usage on /home is above 90%.
    => This machine is being affected by USNs 123, 456 and 789.

The headers at the top will always be present, while notes at the
bottom will report outstanding events.

So the question is: what information would you find useful to look at
during logins, to get an idea of how things are going in your servers?

We obviously can't include too much information because we're limited
to a reasonable amount of space, so it'd be very useful if any ideas
were accompanied by the motivation, as that would help us to figure
together which are the most interesting ones.

Thank you very much.

[1] http://landscape.canonical.com

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net