Linux and Unix servers are typically monitored over SSH rather than SNMP, which avoids needing to install or manage an SNMP daemon on every server.
What you need
- An account on the target server that iPM can authenticate as. Key-based authentication is strongly recommended over passwords.
- The relevant SSH key added under Administration, then SSH Keys, so it's available to select when you add the host.
- Network access from the iPM server to the target on TCP 22.
Adding the host
Add the server as a host using the Wizard (or Auto Discovery for a batch of servers), select the SSH key to authenticate with, and confirm connectivity. Once connected, you can attach the specific checks you want.
Typical Linux checks
- CPU load and utilization
- Memory and swap usage
- Disk space and inode usage per mount point
- Specific process checks (is a given process running?)
- systemd service status for critical services
Keeping checks meaningful
Rather than monitoring everything a server exposes, focus on what actually matters for that host's role — a web server cares about its web service process and disk space for logs, a database server cares far more about memory, disk I/O, and its own service status. Over-monitoring low-value metrics just adds noise to your alerts and dashboards.
For deeper log-level visibility (application logs, security events, and so on) beyond basic resource and process checks, that's the role of itheon's Log Analyzer (iLog) product rather than iPM itself.