what server stats to track / monitor ?

Hey folks,

I'm new to performance monitoring and tuning of PG/Linux (have a fair
bit of experience in Windows, though those skills were last used about
5 years ago)

I finally have Munin set up in my production environment, and my
goodness it tracks a whole whack of stuff by default!

I want to turn off the graphing of unimportant data, to unclutter the
graphs and focus on what's important.

So, from the perspective of both Linux and PG, is there canonical list
of "here are the most important X things to track" ?

On the PG side I currently have 1 graph for # connections, another for
DB size, and another for TPS. Then there are a few more graphs that
are really cluttered up, each with 8 or 9 things on them.

On the Linux side, I clearly want to track HD usage, CPU, memory. But
not sure what aspects of each. There is also a default Munin graph
for IO Stat - not sure what I am looking for there (I know what it
does of course, just not sure what to look for in the numbers)

I know some of this stuff was mentioned at PG Con so now I start going
back through all my notes and the videos. Already been reviewing.

If there is not already a wiki page for this I'll write one. I see
this is a good general jump off point :

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Performance_Optimization

But jumping off from there (and searching on "Performance") does not
come up with anything like what I am talking about.

Is there some good Linux performance monitoring and tuning reading
that you can recommend?

thanks,
-Alan

--
“Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.”
- Glenn Prickett