[seclorum]

Teach them to interpret and understand cat /proc/meminfo .. one of the most interesting things you can do with this is pipe it into gnuplot and watch it over time as things happen. Try it sometimes .. you might get through to one or two.

[ivan78]

If you want to be more enterprisey, you can pipe it to SNMP counter and then draw a graph with your Network Monitoring System. It is much more convenient if you have more that few servers.

[seclorum]

Maybe that's more 'enterprisey', but its more 'system administrator'-ey to just use an onboard gnuplot and look at real graphs without putting much SNMP/traffic-load on the system of interest .. the purpose is to educate the user on how the system works, not use it as a monitoring device for lazy sysadmins.