There's so many ways to skin the management cat. Most of the time I answer the question by saying "Use your management tool of choice, or see if anyone has written some Powershell script to solve that problem". I often forget that sometimes the simple method is best, and we include everything you need to do simple monitoring and alerting in the box.
Vallard has two great posts on this topic where he's already done the work. So follow the links to Vallard's blog and in no time at all you'll be able to answer the question "So how much am I trickling down these big fat pipes?" 
Blog part 1 - http://benincosa.com/blog/?p=622
Blog part 2 - http://benincosa.com/blog/?p=626
Follow Vallard on twitter - https://twitter.com/vallard
