Hi all.

We will be moving from a HP-UX (on Itanium) based platform to 64bit Intel/AMD Linux to run our Java application servers.

We currently use HP Glance on HP-UX to monitor CPU usage, per-process CPU usage, memory usage, disk queue and so on during performance testing. Perhaps we will be able to get a HP Glance for Linux license somewhere down the road but at the moment I need a proper replacement for Glance.

Is there a monitoring tool that will let me monitor processes by name and remotely retrieve the data?

In addition to Glance we use SiteScope, and while it is superb for some uses, monitoring Linux servers and their processes isn't it. I have done some experiments using SiteScope UNIX monitors to retrieve data but it is not very reliable or effective. A Script type SiteScope monitor could work better but that slows down the SiteScope server for some reason.

Any hints here?

Try out Nagios

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart.html

I guess one of the key questions for me is how large is your environment and are you looking for an HP product? The Cluster Management Utility, also known as CMU is an HP product for monitoring/managing linux clusters in the Ks of nodes. It can also use collectl, an opensource tool, for the native monitoring.
-mark