Snmp

The default installation of snmpd in Debian 6 Squeeze will put warnings into the daemon.log.

SNMP is not really simple, but quite useful, if you want to run standard monitoring tools like Nagios, Zero RRD or Cacti.

Even though Java offers JMX over RMI for runtime information like thread and memory consumption, you can also activate SNMP to read at least a subset.

Without special reconfiguration on the SNMP daemon, you are able to check processes on a Linux resp. services on a Windows host remotely:

For the basic remote checks I evaluated several SNMP checks for Nagios and finally moved on with the following to begin with:

SNMP (at least NET-SNMP in Linux) is providing enough data to setup checks for CPU, memory, disk and processes to a standard Nagios.