Monitoring Linux systems using SSH

I agree we need a non-SNMP method to monitor Linux, even if that entails deploying a collector on each server.  Leveraging other tools like collectd would also be nice options.  We have run into various environments where SNMP (even SNMPv3) is verboten due to perceived security concerns.  Even if allowed, manually configuring SNMP on many servers to enable basic data collection seems like a bad plan.