According to one embodiment, a system includes a probe controller associated with a host device and configured to abstract a plurality of device-specific monitoring operations associated with a plurality of heterogeneous host devices to a normalized set of monitoring operations. The probe controller facilitates monitoring of the host device using the normalized set of monitoring operations. The system also includes a first specialized probe module associated with the host device and configured to provide device-specific information in response to the normalized set of monitoring operations. The first specialized probe module accesses, in response to receiving a notification from the probe controller to determine a metric associated with the host device, the metric associated with the host device. The first specialized probe module communicates the metric to the probe controller.