Help writing test -- sar

["James Wade" <jkwade (at) futurefrontiers.com>]

Hello All,
 
I've written my own "sar" test to put sar cpu data
into the database. It's been working fine now for a while.
I don't do any alerting, it's just graphing sar data.
 
However, a recent problem came up. Hobbit uses cpu load
for alerting on high cpu load. However, using cpu load doesn't
take into account i/o wait problems. The cpu may have a low
load on it, but have excessive i/o wait, so as an example, a
24 cpu box, with a load of 12 on it may actually be at 99% utilization.
 
I've seen this on database servers where someone writes a
bad sql query to access the database, or an index file isn't
there. So I want to alert on cpu utilization in addition to cpu load.
 
I want to take my sar test, output is below, that I've written and
have it check for idle time less than 5% for alerting. I've already
modified my test for this.
 
However, when I was orignally writing the sar test to put into the
rrd database, if I included any kind of status message, it would not put
data into the database.
 
What's the format so that it keeps putting data into the database
even if I have a status message? or am I wrong on this?
 
Example:
 
Here's the output of my sar test now:
 
Thu Jul 10 10:35:20  CDT 2008
usr :  3
sys : 1
wio : 1
idle :  95
 
**** GRAPH *****

What I want is something like this if idle is less than 5%:

Thu Jul 10 10:40:30 CDT 2008
* CPU usage is above 95%
user : 40
sys :  10
wio :   47
idle : 3
 
*** GRAPH ****
 
So, if I add to the ouput the CPU usage is above 95%
will I continue to write to the database the stats?
Last time I tried adding status messages like above,
it didn't seem to put anything in the database.

THanks....James