There is a lot going on on the average server and it helps a lot to be able to see how each component performs and under what stress it is. I prepared a few graphs that show most important parameters in a more readable form than default cacti graphs.

First there is memory status showing total phisical memory with swap on top:

Then there is CPU time division to kernel user io itd:

Another important and easy to read metric is disk saturation. I created one graph with busiest device so if you have 2 or more drives only the busiest will be shown. That should tell you when you reach drives capacity.

Another easy to read is blocked and broken processes graph

Simple processes count graph just to see if there is no critical forking etc

Total IO bytes read and written to drives

and finally importand metric of swap IO. Swap is nothing bad as long as you are not reading/writting it, big process swapped to drive is not thread as long as pages swapped are not read back and written to disk again. You can see it here right away.

To use these you will need cacti installation and php script attached on the server you want to monitor in a web folder restricted by htaccess to local network. Then you import graphs data sources and script from xmls provided and you can start monitoring.

UPDATE!

Now after some more work and update you can download a combined set of scripts and templates go to the bundle cacti templates page