Linux
banshee/linux-collection/linux/ssh/
memory
Memory of a Linux by SSH: total, used and available as the kernel counts it (MemAvailable).
by banshee1 installation2 versions
v2Latest
Published on October 28, 2026. One naming convention across collections; documentation completed.
Memory of a Linux, by SSH
Returns the physical memory, the memory available as the kernel counts it, the used memory and its share. Swap is the linux/ssh/swap collector.
Versions
Generic: /proc/meminfo is written by the kernel the same way on Alpine, Debian and Fedora. A kernel older than 3.14, without MemAvailable, stops the collector misconfigured rather than guess.
How it works
The collector runs cat /proc/meminfo and reads MemTotal and MemAvailable.
MemAvailableis the kernel's estimate of what can be given to a program without swapping: free memory plus the caches and buffers that can be dropped. Used memory isMemTotal − MemAvailable: caches do not count as used.- Nothing is written on the target.
Prerequisites
- an SSH account for monitoring, without write rights;
- the fingerprint of the server's host key, set in
protocol:ssh:fingerprint(not needed when the Security settings trust the first SSH fingerprint presented).
Outputs
| Name | Label | Unit | Per instance |
|---|---|---|---|
total | Physical memory | MiB | no |
used | Used memory | MiB | no |
available | Available memory | MiB | no |
used-percent | Used memory | % | no |
Watches
| Name | Title | Kind | Defaults | Checked by default |
|---|---|---|---|---|
memory-high | Memory saturated | above a threshold, on used-percent | warning above 90 %, critical above 95 %, for 3 runs | yes |
available | Little memory available | below a threshold, on available | critical below 512 MiB; no warning | no |
Limits
- In a container without lxcfs,
/proc/meminfoshows the host's memory, not the container's limit.