The Linux tip from a few weeks ago was Nagios monitoring with NRPE allows better tracking of remote systems which talks about using the NRPE daemon on client systems to allow Nagios to get more information from the remote host that would normally be only available to a local user.
Nagios is one of my favourite things to tinker with, and using NRPE is a bit nicer than using the check_by_ssh plugin that I used to use. I don’t really care if the load average or memory usage is sniffed, so using NRPE is nice and easy (and removes the hassles of key-based auth for SSH, seeing all those SSH connections show up in logwatch reports, etc.). If you have the ability to install NRPE on a remote system to monitor, it’s worth trying out.