Question: I recently started exploring [OpenTSDB](http://opentsdb.net) for monitoring a cluster that we have in our development environment. As a newbie, I have not delved deep into it, but was wondering if anyone successfully used OpenTSDB to monitor those.

Any pointers is helpful.

Answer: 
OpenTSDB has a child project to help collect system data from Linux servers and report it to OpenTSDB, called [tcollector](http://opentsdb.net/tcollector.html).

It's a simple data collection system written in Python, and it comes with a dozen+ collectors out of the box, including collectors for vmstat and iostat data. On a standard Linux server you'll get over a hundred system metrics.
OpenTSDB is basically built to handle *very* large amounts of monitoring data, so it is really only applicable if you monitor hundreds over servers, and you want to keep data in full fidelity indefinitely.

If not, you should really look into stuff like [CollectD](http://collectd.org/) or [Graphite](http://graphite.wikidot.com/).