Utilization metrics are gathered with externally invoked operating system commands using platform-specific arguments and version-specific output parsing, such as iostat and netstat.

Enabling the Host System monitor provider automatically gathers CPU and memory utilization, but only optionally gathers disk and network information. Disk and network interfaces are enumerated in the configuration by device names (such as eth0 or lo), and by disk device names (such as sd1, sdab, sda2, scsi0).