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 monitoring tasks to given environment with minimal efforts. WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) and SSH (Secure Shell) can be used as alternative to SNMP, on Windows and Unix-like system, correspondingly. 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. Apart from CPU load, SNMP can be used on variety of systems to monitor RAM usage, disk space used/remaining and number of running processes.

Looking for software to monitor CPU load and other hardware metrics? IPHost Network Monitor offers convenient and lightweight monitor types to handle this task. 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. That said, you can detect inefficient setups for heavy applications such as database management systems, data processing software (including encryption, media transcoding etc). You might wish to monitor other resources usage 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. After that, set state conditions and assign alerts, to get notified promptly. To begin with CPU usage 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. However, cases of constant high load during long time periods (regardless of which exact metric is assumed) are most probably indicating a problem. By itself, high infrequent peaks of CPU usage are inevitable in most setups.

Linux monitor cpu usage