Finally I ran into a tool to quickly set up monitoring of a Debian server. " aptitude install munin " It graphs more than I was hoping for, including: disk space, cpu load, network and even disk smart parameters. Basic configuration of alerts is simple, edit /etc/munin/munin.conf - Uncomment and edit a contact -line - Determine name of plugin to configure, for example "cpu" - it's the suffix after hyphen in the detail view URL. - Determine name of the field to configure, for example "user" - The fields are listed in the bottom of the detail view. Add the warning and critical limits in [localhost.localdomain] section, for example: cpu.user.warning 200 cpu.user.critical 200