About 4 years ago I wrote this tool inspired by Rob Urban's collect tool for DEC's Tru64 Unix. What makes this tool as different as collect was in its day is its ability to run at a low overhead and collect tons of stuff. I've expanded the general concept and even include data not available in any other tool such as Infiniband or Lustre data. Collectl can collect it all and present it in a consistent output format. There's even an option to let you generate the data in plottable format.
Far to many features to talk about here but they are discussed on the website for collectl
Ever wonder why ALL tools that monitor linux network stats at 1 second intervals report the wrong numbers? The short answer is because the stats are only updated once ever 0.9765 seconds and unless you have a monitor that can run at fractional intervals like collectl, you'll get wrong numbers! You can read more about it on collectl's website but don't take my word for it. Download it and try it out.
-mark