System Administration

Excellent System Utilities: Glances – CLI curses-based monitoring tool

Last Updated on May 28, 2022

Summary

Glances is an excellent system administration tool that offers a smorgasbord amount of information in one single central place. There’s good use of colour which helps pertinent stats stand out.

Glances lets you export all system statistics to CSV, InfluxDB, Cassandra, OpenTSDB, StatsD, ElasticSearch or even RabbitMQ. There’s even a dedicated Grafana dashboard.

Glances is a monitoring tool only. For example, unlike top, it doesn’t currently let you kill an individual process. But in the next major release there are plans to add a new feature which will let you display the process list by pages, with the ability to navigate through the processes, and kill an individual process. This will be a very useful addition as currently it’s necessary to exit Glances and run a different command to kill a process, or fire up another terminal.

Glances’ memory footprint is smaller than gtop. Memory usage of Glances is approximately 67MB.

Website: nicolargo.github.io/glances
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Nicolas Hennion, Alessio Sergi, Floran Brutel, Brandon Philips, Jon Renner, Maxime Desbrus, Nicolas Hart, Sylvain Mouquet, Erik Eriksson, and many contributors
License: GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0

Glances is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary


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