Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm setting up a cron job to collect memory usage (total, used, available) information.

I'm planning to run the following in the cron sript:
free -k | grep ^M | awk -F' ' '{print $1","$2","$3","$4 }' >> /data/mem_report.txt

Is there a better way (another command) to get more accurate information?
I will be taking the collected info back to my Linux administrators. So I just want to be make sure I'm getting accurate information.

Thank you.
:-)

LStat? Other tools like LStat?
If there is something ready then why don't use it?
It depends what you want to get. If you wish minimal CPU/memory consumption with some command that is executed let say once a day - then your solution is probably a good one.