linux - How to quickly find out if a *nix server is running OK?

Often when I find myself in front of a unix/linux (or any other *nix variant) console and have to quickly diagnose the server's condition, I just can't remember everything that should be checked.

I'll try a vmstat, some ps/top manoeuvres, read procinfo and some log files (boot & sys), but what I'd really like is a quick way to view Cpu, Hard disk and Physical Memory condition.

I seem to know a lot of it already is present in vmstat, but somehow I miss the ease of server 2008 where you can find a nice resource monitor while even the task manager itself can provide a quick peek on the system condition (and not even talking about server 2008's monitoring graph tools).

Any suggestion, or am I just being lame because vmstat really is the grail ?

Edit:
Well thanks for the feedback, everyone. I should add that I'm not really talking about constant monitoring (where nagios is a very good proposition), but about an occasional walk to a server - not necessarily mine - to do a quick system condition lookup (sometimes I just happen to be somewhere and Bang, Hey, can you come over to check this one ?)

The stick with some utility-scripts is indeed nice, already have one with sysinternals apps for windows machines. Htop is cool also, although I don't think being able to install it wherever I happen to be.

Answer

top is a good tool (if its installed), but the other one I like for a real quick look to see if anything is wrong is dmesg. That should let you know if the server's experiencing something incredibly major (disconnected nics, disk faults, memory faults etc).

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