If you want to be more enterprisey, you can pipe it to SNMP counter and then draw a graph with your Network Monitoring System. It is much more convenient if you have more that few servers.
Maybe that's more 'enterprisey', but its more 'system administrator'-ey to just use an onboard gnuplot and look at real graphs without putting much SNMP/traffic-load on the system of interest .. the purpose is to educate the user on how the system works, not use it as a monitoring device for lazy sysadmins.
