Detect High CPU Utilization in Linux
CPU usage is of crucial importance in most cases. Majority of network devices nowadays are capable of allowing SNMP access and control. IPHost Network Monitor provides you with fast and lightweight tool to measure CPU load over SNMP. All versions of SNMP (v1, v2c and v3) are supported, including encryption and authentication features of v3. Hence, the SNMP CPU monitor is a convenient way to control CPU usage in Linux and other UNIX-like systems and on various network equipment, where the SNMP protocol is supported out of box.
The SNMP CPU monitor type provides several metrics you can use to detect certain possible problems with CPU utilization:
- total active time
- user time
- system time
- interrupts per second
- context switches per second
You are encouraged to read more of the above metrics in online help. Depending on what exactly you want to control, you can monitor one or more metrics for the same host.
The SNMP CPU Monitor to Prevent CPU Load Problems
monitor parameters
By itself, high infrequent peaks of high CPU usage are inevitable in most setups. However, cases of constant high load during long time periods (regardless of which exact metric is assumed) are most probably indicating a problem. To begin with CPU load monitoring, set up monitors for all the metrics and let them run for a day or longer period, to gather statistics and have an impression of typical situation. After that, set state conditions for these monitors and assign alerts, to get notified promptly.
You might wish to monitor performance of other hardware resources and compare the peaks reports for all of them, compare trends and make estimations, whether you have much enough resources to handle all the tasks the device is assigned. That said, you can detect inefficient setups for heavy applications such as database management systems, data processing software (including encryption, media transcoding etc).
That, in turn, gives you possibility to estimate when the device is short of resources and what should be done to distribute or lift unnecessary load, preventing sudden downtime.
WMI and SSH Monitors for Hardware Metrics
Looking for server monitoring software to watch CPU load and other hardware metrics? IPHost Network Monitor offers convenient and lightweight monitor types to handle this task. Apart from CPU load, SNMP can be used on variety of systems to monitor memory usage, disk space used/remaining and number of running processes. Strictly speaking, SNMP agent can be instructed to put arbitrary new variables in is tree, thus allowing to use SNMP to monitor in uniform way any other hardware or software entity.
WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) and SSH (Secure Shell) can be used as alternative to SNMP, on Windows and UNIX-like system, correspondingly. Note that more than one method (counting SNMP, WMI and SSH) can be available on the same system at the same time, thus allowing to adapt your monitoring system to given environment with minimal efforts.
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