Scripting library for monitoring server health?

Question

Is there a scripting library preferably in Python/Perl/Ruby that allows you to get information on disk, load, a list of processes running, cpu usage in a standard way?

I always end up parsing df, uptime, ps etc. Given that these differ on different Unix flavors and need to be done in a totally different way on Windows, I would have thought that someone would have already done this.

Answer 1

Most simple is monit: http://mmonit.com/monit/

A step up, as @lawrencealan mentioned, is Nagios: http://nagios.org/

And here's a new interesting effort: http://amon.cx/

Answer 2

(ruby) Daniel Berger maintains a lot of gems in this field. Look for sys-cpu, sys-uptime, sys-uname, sys-proctable, sys-host, sys-admin, sys-filesystem - all multi-platform AFAIK.