glances - a simple but cool monitoring tool

I always am on the lookout for tools to help with monitoring a diagnosing issues. The best tools I find are those that quickly show you the information you need to know in an easy to read manner. I just discovered the excellent tool glances which is a a cross-platform curses-based monitoring tool. It shows a lot of useful information but in a manner that is easy to read. It can even be used in client/server mode!

Information shown includes :

• Disk Usage per mount point
• Disk I/O
• Network Rx/s + Tx/s
• Memory Usage
• CPU Usage
• Process
• Uptime

I really like that it has color codes for state :

• Green : OK
• Blue : Careful
• Magenta : Warning
• Red : Critical

Installation

Arch Linux

• From standard Arch or Raspberry Pi based ARM :

$ pacman -S glances

Ubuntu (13.04+)

• From standard apt-get :

$sudo apt-get -y install glances


Debian/Ubuntu (pre 13.04)

•  From python's 'pip'

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev

$ sudo pip install glances

CentOS/Red Hat

• Configure the EPEL repository
• Then install via yum

# yum -y install glances

Refresh Time

• The default is 3 seconds but this can easily be changed e.g.

$ glances -t 10

Interactive Commands

• a : Sort process list automatically
• b : Switch between bit/s or Byte/s for network I/O
• c : Sort processes by CPU usage
• d : Show/hide disk I/O stats
• f : Show/hide file system stats
• h : Show/hide the help screen
• i : Sort processes by I/O rate
• l : Show/hide log messages
• m : Sort processes by MEM usage
• n : Show/hide network stats
• p : Sort processes by name
• q : Quit
• s : Show/hide sensors stats (only available with -e flag)
• t : View network I/O as combination
• u : View cumulative network I/O
• w : Delete finished warning log messages
• x : Delete finished warning and critical log messages
• y : Show/hide hddtemp stats (only available with -y flag)
• 1 : Switch between global CPU and per-CPU stats
   

 Client/Server mode

• In the server :

$ glances -s
Glances server is running on 0.0.0.0:61209

• On Client

 $ glances -c @server

• The footer will display the connection information e.g. Connected to @pi is shown below