.. _monitoring/monitoring-a-linux:

=========================
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:

  * :ref:`SNMP <monitoring/monitoring-a-linux-via-snmp>` -- Install or activate the linux SNMP agent and configure it to serve system statistics;
  * :ref:`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;
  * :ref:`Monitoring Publicly Available Services <monitoring/network-service>` -- Public services provided by GNU/Linux devices (like HTTP, FTP, POP3, etc.) can be easily monitored.