Monitoring System Parameters like Memory, CPU and Disks on Linux Systems via SNMP

Every other day users of our monitoring products PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor ask us how they can monitor system parameters like CPU load, memory load, swap file size or disk usage on Linux and Unix systems. Today we have published a new step-by-step article in our knowledgebase that explains how to set up system parameter monitoring for Linux systems. 

There are two steps that need to be taken: First you must install the NET-SNMP daemon on the Linux server - which is the more complicated step. After this is done you can easily use a built-in feature of PRTG and IPCheck to find all available sensors on the systems and create sensors for them for monitoring. Creating new sensors will now only be a matter of a few mouse clicks. Probably the most interesting parameters that you can monitor this way are:

• mem avail swap: Available Swap Space on the host.
• mem avail real: Available Real/Physical Memory Space on the host.
• cpu raw user: User CPU time in ticks per second, as reported by the kernel. Total ticks is 100xNumber of Processors. For single processor machine numbers will appear to be percentages as the kernel will tally ticks at 100 per second.
• cpu raw idle: Idle CPU time in ticks per second, as reported by the kernel.
• ss raw contexts: Number of context switches
• dsk percent: Percentage of space used on disk

Read more in the knowledge base article "Monitoring System Parameters like Memory, CPU and Disks on Linux Systems via SNMP".