If Fred wants to monitor a specific process on his nodes, though, your solution is going to be near optimal. It's an economic tradeoff. Complete information is expensive in system load but obviously maximally useful. If one is satisfied with only load averages and other coarse grained indicators, though, the cost may not be worth the benefit. This may work, if there is money in it.
Companies have to have a bottom line advantage to invest systems maintenance costs in something.
Thank you for your comments Robert. As you know, I continue to be very interested in this whole project.