After discovering the level of insight you can gain into Linux systems with the "new" Disk I/O statistics as provided by iostat I wondered why there weren't any sane munin plugins which utilize this data, since this ought to be very easy task to accomplish.

Having a few days to kill (being down with stomach flu back then) I decided to write a plugin on my own. I'll provide an annotated example of what the data looks like and why having this kind of information is A Good Thing.

I always wondered why disks are slow. Not the "I can only copy data with 50MiB/sec slow" but the "Why does this myisamchk/e2fsck/database only do 3MiB/sec" slow. It never itched my nerve that much that I seriously considered "formally" learning about these things, until the first few days at a new job. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I need a new TV!

Since I've been stuck with a 27" CRT TV for the last few years (which always felt far too small for my ~3.5-4 m couch distance) and have been hit by the HDTV-reliance of modern console games ("you call the blob in the lower left corner a 'HUD'?") I longed for a proper "display unit" for quite some time.

After getting overtime/vacation payoffs from my last job in November and an unexpected bonus in December, all rational thoughts have been finally thrown over board - let's burn some money!