Monitoring Your Server With Glances

Overview

Glances is a command line based system monitoring tool written in Python that uses the psutil library to fetch statistics about your system. Glances has the ability to monitor load averages, CPU usage, network interfaces, memory usage, disk usage, processes, and space utilization.

Requirements

• A VPS from Vultr running the operating system of your choice. In this guide we’ll be using Ubuntu 14, but instructions are also included for the RHEL family.
• A few moments of your time.

Installation

Log into your server using SSH.

Update your package list (Ubuntu/Debian).

sudo apt-get update

Install Glances (Ubuntu/Debian).

sudo apt-get install glances

(CentOS/Fedora/RHEL):

yum install -y glances

Using Glances

To start Glances, simply run the following command.

glances

To close Glances press q, CTRL+C, or ESC.

Glances has a few hotkeys that you can use while it’s running to change the items being displayed.

• a – Sort processes automatically.
• c – Sort processes by CPU usage.
• m – Sort processes by memory usage.
• p – Sort processes by name.
• i – Sort processes by disk usage.
• d – Toggle disk I/O statistics.
• f – Toggle file system statistics.
• n – Toggle network statistics.
• s – Toggle sensor statistics.
• y – Toggle disk temperature statistics.
• l – Toggle warning logs.
• b – Bytes or bits for network usage.
• w – Delete warning logs.
• x – Delete warning and critical logs.
• 1 – Global CPU or per-CPU stats.
• t – View network usage as a combination.
• u – View cumulative network usage.

Glances also uses color codes to display statuses:

• Green – OK (Everything is working properly)
• Blue – Careful (attention)
• Violet – Warning (alert)
• Red – Critical (critical)

Conclusion

Glances is a very powerful, yet simple to use monitoring tool for Linux systems. It’s ideal for when you want to get quick statistics about your system in an easy to read environment. It combines the most frequently accessed statistics into one page.

That concludes the installation of Glances on your server, enjoy!