Munin is a great system monitoring software using the Maser/Node architecture:
Surprisingly munin-node, unlike munin-master, is quite difficult to get working without root access.
Munin-node.PHP is a node server written entirely from scratch in PHP and has no further dependencies. Its goal is to provide a quick way to monitor a machine
Edit the proper section in munin.conf on the master in order to add the node:
[mynode.net] address 127.0.0.1 port 4949 use_node_name yes
Before starting the node, check that plugins are made available. If the plugins/ directory is emply, go to the base directory (where munin-node.php is situated) and add a couple of plugins:
cd plugins ln -s ../extra/cpu cpu ln -s ../extra/memory memory ln -s ../extra/plugin.sh plugin.sh
Then you can launch munin-node.php on the node:
php munin-node.php nofork
nofork option forces the script to stay in forgrounds and display what is going on.
The archive contains a couple of plugins taken from munin to get you started, but there's MANY more available to you from the munin community or munin default installation!
The node itself is provided under the ISC license. The plugins are provided under the GPL by munin.