Glances System Monitor

Glances is a free and open-source cross-platform system monitoring tool that provides a comprehensive, real-time overview of system resources in a single terminal or web interface. Created in 2012 by Nicolas Hennion (also known as Nicolargo), a French software engineer, Glances is written in Python and uses the psutil library for system statistics. The project has been downloaded millions of times via pip and is one of the most popular CLI system monitors. Key features: all-in-one view: unlike individual tools that show one metric (top for CPU, iotop for disk I/O, nethogs for network), this tool displays CPU, memory, swap, disk I/O, network I/O, file system mounts, processes, Docker containers, sensors (temperature, fan speed), and alerts all in a single screen. Real-time: all metrics update in real-time (default 3-second refresh, configurable). The curses-based interface uses color coding (green=normal, blue=careful, purple=warning, red=critical) for instant visual assessment of system health. Process management: detailed per-process view showing PID, user, CPU percentage, memory percentage, I/O rate, and command. Sort by any column. Kill processes directly from the interface. Container monitoring: automatic detection and monitoring of Docker, Podman, and LXC containers, showing container resource usage alongside system processes. Web server mode: run in web server mode (glances -w) to access a full web dashboard from any browser, with RESTful JSON API for integration with monitoring systems. Client-server mode: monitor remote systems by running the server on the target machine and connecting from a client. Export: export metrics to CSV, JSON, StatsD, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, MQTT, and Prometheus for long-term storage and visualization in Grafana. Thresholds: configurable alert thresholds for each metric. Plugins: extensible plugin architecture for custom metrics. Python. LGPL-3.0.