Overview

This event monitor connects to your Linux-based systems using SSH and retrieves CPU usage data. It can alert based on average and maximum CPU usage either overall or on a per-core basis.

Use Cases

• Detecting systems that are using excessive CPU
• Detecting the top CPU-consuming processes

Monitoring Options

This event monitor provides the following options:

Alert with [Info/Warning/Error/Critical] if the SSH server is unreachable

Use this option to control whether or not you will be notified if the event monitor is unable to establish an SSH connection.

Alert if the average CPU usage is greater than a specified value

The event monitor will sample the CPU usage multiple times. This option lets you set thresholds based on the detected average CPU usage.

Alert if the maximum CPU usage is greater than a specified value.

The event monitor will sample the CPU usage multiple times. This option lets you set thresholds based on the detected maximum CPU usage.

Alert if the average CPU usage on an individual core is greater than a specified value.

This option is similar to the overall average CPU usage check but instead, it looks at individual CPU cores.

Alert if the maximum CPU usage on an individual core is greater than a specified value

This option is similar to the overall maximum CPU usage check but instead, it looks at individual CPU cores.

Include a list of the top 10 processes in every notification.

With this option selected the event monitor will include a list of the top ten processes, ranked by CPU usage, in all alerts and notifications.

Connect on port number

The default port for SSH connections is 22 but if your servers are using a non-standard port you can specify it here.

Authentication and Security

The account used for authentication must have interactive login rights via SSH. In addition, it must have permission to run the following commands:

• cat /proc/cpuinfo
• sysctl -a
• ps -eo

Protocols

Data Points

This event monitor generates the following data points:

Data Point	Description
Maximum CPU Usage	The maximum CPU used during the sampling period.
Average CPU Usage	The average CPU used during the sampling period.

Sample Output

Tutorial

To view the tutorial for this event monitor, click here.