Systems, methods and computer readable media that provide stateless fault tolerance and load balanced data collection using overlay namespaces are described. A cluster is used. Each node of the cluster may be a monitoring system. A data provider process may run on each node in the cluster. Each node has an overlay namespace which comprises one or more links to namespaces on other nodes, and local viewpoints of those linked namespaces. When a node detects a resource waiting to be monitored, it queries other nodes to determine whether object creation for that resource is allowed. It creates an object only if no other node is creating or has created an object for that resource.