 I'm a nerd when it comes to system monitors. It's a weird thing to nerd out on, but I really enjoy watching what my system does and kind of paying attention to all of the minute details on what's going on on my computer. It's just something that I enjoy doing. I almost always have H top somewhere at hand. It may not always be running, but it's one of those commands that I have assigned to a key binding and can just pop it up whenever I want to. And I did the same thing for when I was using B top and be pie top beforehand. I had a key binding for those things that pop up. I'd see it. It's honestly surprising that I haven't given that a scratch pad yet. So maybe I'll do that later. So today what I'm going to do is take a look at a system monitor that I've just heard about even though it's been around for a fairly long time. And that system monitor is called glances now glances has a ton of features way more features than I could ever cover here and way more features than I could ever possibly use it. It monitors way more than just your system resources and stuff like that, but it does do that too. So that's why I'm interested in it. So let me show you what glances looks like. So this is glances. Now it is not the most organized interface that you'll find when it comes to system monitors. It's not. It's very geeky. There's a ton of information here. And it doesn't stand out unless you actually know what you're looking at. So along the top you have information on your CPU and your memory. So it'll give you things like load your buffer your cash free use stuff like that all that stuff is there at the top along the side along the left hand side here you have information on your network and your disk IO. So that's going to show you what is going on on your disks in terms of read write speeds and stuff stuff like that. In the center you have your task list. Now your task list is the one place where you can absolutely interact with the UI. So you can scroll up and down using the arrow keys. So you can see this little arrow over here that will highlight the particular process that you're on. You can also sort by different categories. So right now I'm sorted by CPU I can sort by memory I can sort by user I can sort by time I can sort by rewrite on the IO. And so on and so forth and you can sort by alphabetical as well which is really nice. You can also search by using the enter key so you can enter a name of a process here or you could enter a regex search for process here if you wanted to and it would then show you the one line of that particular process. My one qualm about this particular feature here is that you can't exit this without searching. So if you get into this by accident there's no way to get out of it unless you actually control you know control C out of glances and then go back. So if you get into the filter options by default you have to filter something in order to actually get out of it. That's kind of annoying. So you can also kill prep processes here if you want to so you can highlight it and then press K to kill and it will kill that particular process. I did not see different options for different Siggins here. So if you are interested in using one of the other like 15 or 45 or whatever there are a number of Siggins that are out there you can't I don't see different options for that. Maybe you won't need it because it will just go through and show you this particular pop up and you can press yes or no. So I'll just hit no there and it won't actually quit Pycom which is what I had highlighted. So there is some interactivity in the UI and if all you ever need is a system monitor which is basically what I want to use. This is all you'd ever need to pay attention to it works really really well and it looks kind of neat it's very very nerdy. It maybe is not as laid out as well as some of the other system monitors that I've used but I particularly like this UI layout quite a lot. It has a lot of information and I like that. But if you want more that's where glances really shines. So I'm going to talk about two things here and there could be many more things that I could talk about but I'm going to talk about the two things that you probably should know and look into when you get into this. So the first thing is the web server mode. So if you run glances like this with a dash W flag it's going to start glances in the background on this particular machine then anywhere on your network you can open up this particular URL and it will show you glances inside your web browser. So you could do this like I said anywhere on your network and that means that you could monitor a computer remotely from anywhere on your network if you needed to do so. You could monitor all the stuff that glances covers and all of the information is right here. So the only downside of seeing that to this is that it's not interactive so you can't scroll through the tasks you can't sort through different things it's just the way it is. That's a little bit of a downside but if all you need to do is monitor a remote computer on your network somewhere or remote server somewhere this would work just fine and it allows you to get all the information that you need then and then if you needed to interact with glances somewhere different on a different computer on your network you could do so by using glances in client server mode so you could start the server on the machine you want to monitor and then go to a different computer on your network and then you could assign that particular instance of glances to monitor the other computer or the other server or whatever and in that instance you could actually interact with glances and kill processes and all that stuff all of the different commands then would work and you'd be controlling everything from a remote client instead of the server if that makes any sense at all now in terms of actual commands that you can do inside of glances there are a lot of them most of them have to do with sorting but you can see that there's just quite a few of them pretty much every letter has a option assigned to it and some of it is to toggle different portions of the interface some of it is to interact with how those portions are sorted and so on and so forth so I would highly recommend checking out the documentation which I will link to in the video description it will allow you to get a better sense of what glances can do and how you interact with the UI so the other thing that I wanted to talk about is the configuration file and the configuration file does not come on your system by default at least it did not for me it says on the documentation that it does but I didn't see it on my computer it wasn't in the place where they said it was so I had to get it off the GitHub page not a big deal I just wanted to point that out if you ended up downloading this and trying it out so once you get the configuration file in the proper place this is what it looks like it's split into several different parts and for the most part the first section is going to be all about how the UI reacts to certain thresholds so when your CPU gets up to a certain percentage it changes colors and highlights and stuff like that you can change those thresholds in this first section of the configuration file and that gives you very minute control over when those highlights come up so you can do things when you want to be careful warning critical and so on and so forth for your CPU memory swap GPU network IO all that stuff can be tweaked and customized whatever you know in this first section here in the configuration file it's at the bottom of the configuration file that where you'll find a good sense of what glances can actually do because there's quite a few things here that it can monitor inside the UI that half the stuff I don't even know what it is or I've just heard about it I don't know how to use it I would never need it so there are certain things like Prometheus is here there's a couple databases here Kafka's here like as a couch DB there's influx DB there's actually two different versions of influx DB that it will monitor or at least has two different ways of monitoring and influx DB and there's a couple other databases here that will monitor as well so as you can see as we scroll up here there's a ton of different things that glances can actually pay attention to if you know how to set it up so really at the end of the day how glances looks and what it's monitoring is up to you and that's one of the things that I really like about it now a lot of system monitors will allow you to change what it monitors so you can change you know you can turn the CPU monitoring off an H top if you wanted to you could do that same thing and beat be top you can remove things from the UI and whatever so that's not all that unique it's the extra things that it can monitor that makes glances special there's also the client server stuff where you can set up one computer or server as the server for glances and then view all that information on a distant client you can also monitor glances through the web interface if you wanted to so those things are all fairly unique to glances now there are obviously more enterprise like software solutions that do the same kind of stuff but this one here's free open source and allows you to geek out on it even if you don't have need for half of the features which is really nice so I really like glances I don't know that it would replace be top for me because be top is a little bit more organized and easier to read at a glance but this has way more information so if you are the kind of person who really wants to dial down into as much information about your computer as possible glances is a really good option for you so that is glances and I like I said I really do quite like it I like how much information is there that really does appeal to the nerd inside of me so if you have comments on glances you can leave them 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