With this plugin munin can give you a nice graph and some details where your packages come from, how old or new your installation is. Furtermore it tells you how many updates you should have been installed, how many packages are outdated and where they come from.
You can sort installed or upgradable Packages by 'archive', 'origin', 'site', 'label' and 'component' and even some of them at once.
The script uses caching cause it is quite expensive. It saves the output to a cachefile and checks on each run, if dpkg-status or downloaded Packagefile have changed. If one of them has changed, it runs, if not it gives you the cached version.
This plugin has checked on Debian - Wheezy and squeeze. If you want to use it on older installations, tell me whether it works or which errors you had. It shoud run past python-apt 0.7 and python 2.5.
check out this git repository from
aptitude install python-apt
git clone git://github.com/Farom/munin-debian-packages.git
cd munin-debian-packages
sudo cp deb_packages.py /etc/munin/plugins
sudo cp deb_packages.munin-conf /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/deb_packages
If you copied deb_packages.munin-conf to plugin-conf.d you have a starting point. A typical configuration looks like this
[deb_packages]
# plugin is quite expensive and has to write statistics to cache output
# so it has to write to plugins.cache
user munin
# Packagelists to this size are printed as extra information to munin.extinfo
env.MAX_LIST_SIZE_EXT_INFO 50
# All these numbers are only for sorting, so you can use env.graph01_sort_by_0
# and env.graph01_sort_by_2 without using env.graph01_sort_by_1.
# sort_by values ...
# possible values are 'label', 'archive', 'origin', 'site', 'component'
env.graph00_type installed
env.graph00_sort_by_0 label
env.graph00_sort_by_1 archive
env.graph00_show_ext_0 origin
env.graph00_show_ext_1 site
env.graph01_type upgradable
env.graph01_sort_by_0 label
env.graph01_sort_by_1 archive
env.graph01_show_ext_0 origin
env.graph01_show_ext_1 site
You can sort_by one or some of these possible Values