Getting system information through network

Question

Is there any way to get system information(cpu load, mem usage) through the network for example through a raw TCP socket or over xml-rpc, both in nix based systems and win32?

Tried looking for some software that provides this, but does windows provide this natively and are there any nix distributions that will do this natively?

Answer 1

If you have SNMP on your server then you can poll it and collect the data. There is no network port that just already has the data streaming off of it ready to be harvested. Setting up a monitoring system is probably the way to go if you want things like process monitoring, CPU load monitoring, service monitoring and that sort of thing.

If you want hardware info like temperature, and fanspeed that is more commonly available from SNMP and can be intergrated into a monitoring system.

Nagios and Xymon are two pretty good options.

Answer 2

SNMP can do it. Although, what they say about regexs is most definitely true about SNMP.

Answer 3

You can get this information from SNMP for both windows and Linux. With windows you have the additional option of using WMI.

Your best best would be to look at monitoring software such as Nagios. Any good monitoring solution will be able to poll this information, although you may need to install agents on your target machines.

Answer 4

Not through "a raw TCP socket", as some form of agent will always be required to send that information, be it built-in ar add-on. I use Nagios for this, as well as many other monitoring jobs.