Probably the most traditional way of performing these tasks is to have a service run on NT that gathers your stats and updates SNMP with the data.

Your Linux box would then communicate to the SNMP service and retrieve the information.

Most commercial products like HP OpenView, Tivoli, CA Network IT (use to be TNG) are all applications that retrieve data via SNMP and MIB's and store that data in their own database.

However there is a new player that has some new nice ideas that none of the above mentioned commercial products have done. All of the applications above monitor a system i.e. processor usage, memory usage, disk I/O's, etc... but this company developed a utility that monitors services or applications and reports there status as well as system stats. The company and product are called "Net IQ". This product truly does add new ideas to monitoring software.

When developing a monitoring stats app I think it is all the same if you use SNMP, MIB's, or just plane-jane files as long as all the info gets to the same place! Just remember its what your monitoring that counts and it is that which you should be concentrating on.

Earle