Process Monitoring Over SNMP

Monitoring Stats for Running Processes on UNIX

SNMP Process monitor: memory usage graph
SNMP Process memory usage monitor

Processes perform all actual work on the device; watching what processes are running can be important, to get instantly notified when certain service fails or, for example, runs too long. IPHost Network Monitor allows monitoring processes count, as well as CPU and memory usage for known process. All the three SNMP protocol versions can be used for that (v1, v2c and v3).

To learn more on the mentioned metrics, please read corresponding online help page. Under certain circumstances, more than metric on the same process can be used. The SNMP Process monitor also allows to specify expected mandatory command-line parameters, to only take into account processes requiring monitoring.

In order to use SNMP Process monitor an SNMP agent should work on a monitored host. Hence, the SNMP Process monitor is a handful tool for monitoring processes on various network devices (SNMP can be the only way to get a process metric for certain devices), on Linux and other UNIX-like systems as well as on Windows servers.

Setup SNMP Process Monitor For Common Cases

SNMP Process memory usage monitor parameters
SNMP Process memory usage
monitor parameters

Most common monitoring use case is watching that required service or program be constantly running (choose “Processes total” metric and raise alarm if it drops to 0). In certain cases, such as for Web service daemons, more than one process instance is required. Then alarm should be triggered if count of processes is below known integer value (say, 3).

Using “Memory usage total” metric allows to monitor memory usage  for the processes of given name. That can be helpful to detect possible memory leak or watch applications that can request too much memory.

“CPU usage total” metric helps to detect applications causing too high CPU utilization (that can render entire system unusable). Application servers can be a good example of CPU-intensive programs.

Note that, as in case of any hardware resource monitor, SNMP process monitor should be run for some time, if CPU/memory usage should be monitored, to learn about typical bounds for the process, to avoid both false alarms and outages having gone unnoticed.

WMI and SSH Monitors for Hardware Stats

Looking for system monitoring tools to check number of processes and their RAM/CPU utilization? IPHost Network Monitor allows monitoring miscellaneous types of hardware resources. Apart from monitoring processes stats, SNMP can be used on variety of systems to monitor CPU load, check memory consumption, track disk usage and a variety of other resources. Note: SNMP agent can set up any new variables in its tree, making it possible to use SNMP to monitor a number of hardware components as well as software.

WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) and SSH (Secure Shell) can be used interchangeably with SNMP, on Windows and Unix-like system, correspondingly. Keep in mind that more than one technique to access/modify network device data can be used on the same device.

Download System Monitoring Tools

IPHost Network Monitor provides you with 30-days trial period, all features fully enabled during trial. Begin monitoring your systems right away, that takes just a few minutes!

Related Links