monitoring-a-linux.rst

Monitoring Linux devices

This document describes how you can monitor "private" services and attributes of GNU/Linux devices, such as:

• Memory usage
• CPU load
• Disk usage
• Running processes
• etc.

Available Methods

Several methods to monitor GNU/Linux devices are available:

• SNMP <monitoring/monitoring-a-linux-via-snmp> -- Install or activate the linux SNMP agent and configure it to serve system statistics;
• Local Agent <monitoring/monitoring-a-linux-via-local-agent> -- Provides faster query interval, more flexibility, passive and active communication methods;
• SSH -- Should only be executed for infrequent checks as these have a high impact on the client and server CPU. It's also very slow to execute overall, and will not scale when polling thousands of devices;
• Monitoring Publicly Available Services <monitoring/network-service> -- Public services provided by GNU/Linux devices (like HTTP, FTP, POP3, etc.) can be easily monitored.