☩ Walking in Light with Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary

If you're Linux / UNIX / BSD system administrator you already have experience with basic admin's system monitoring:

•     CPU load
•     OS Name/Kernel version
•     System load avarage and Uptime
•     Disk and Network Input/Output I/O operations by interface
•     Process statistics / Top loading processes etc.
•     Memory / SWAP usage and free memory
•     Mounted partitions

Such info is provided by command line tools such as:

top, df, free, sensors, ifconfig, iotop, hddtemp, mount, nfsstat, nfsiostat, dstat, uptime, nethogs iptraf

etc.

There are plenty of others advanced tools also Web based server monitoring visualization  tools, such as Monit, Icanga, PHPSysInfo, Cacti which provide you statistics on computer hardware and network utilization

So far so good, if you already are used to convenience of web *NIX based monitoring but you don't want to put load on the servers with such and you're lazy to write custom scripts that show most important monitoring information – necessery for daily system administration monitoring and prevention from downtimes and tracking bottlenecks you will be glad to hear about Glances
 

Glances is a free (LGPL) cross-platform curses-based monitoring tool which aims to present a maximum of information in a minimum of space, ideally to fit in a classical 80×24 terminal or higher to have additionnal information. Glances can adapt dynamically the displayed information depending on the terminal size. It can also work in a client/server mode for remote monitoring.

1. Installing Glances curses-based monitoring tool on Debian 7 / Ubuntu 13+ / Mint  Linux

We have to install python-pip (python package installer tool) to later install Glances

apt-get install –yes 'python-dev' 'python-jinja2' 'python-psutil'
                        'python-setuptools' 'hddtemp' 'python-pip' 'lm-sensors'

Before proceeding to install Glances to make Thermal sensors working (if supported by hardware) run:

 sensors-detect

Glances is written in Python and uses psutil library to obtain monitoring statistic values, thus it is necessery to install few more Python libraries:

pip install 'batinfo' 'pysensors'

If you're about to use pip – Python package installer tool, behind a proxy server use instead:
 

pip install –proxy=http://your-proxy-host.com:8080 'batinfo' 'pysensors'

Then install Glances script itself again using pip
 

pip install 'Glances'

Downloading/unpacking Glances
  Downloading Glances-2.0.1.tar.gz (3.3Mb): 3.3Mb downloaded
  Running setup.py egg_info for package Glances
    
Downloading/unpacking psutil>=2.0.0 (from Glances)
  Downloading psutil-2.1.1.tar.gz (216Kb): 216Kb downloaded
  Running setup.py egg_info for package psutil
…

Successfully installed Glances psutil

Then run glances from terminal
 

glances -t 3

-t 3 option tells glances to refresh collected statistics every 3 seconds

2. Installing Glances monitoring console tool on CentOS / RHEL / Fedora / Scientific Linux

Installing glances on CentOS 7 / Fedora and rest of RPM based distributions can be done by adding external RPM repositories, cause glances is not available in default yum repositories.

To enable Extra-packages repositories:
 

rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Then update yum to include new repository's packages into package list and install python-pip and python-devel rpms
 

yum update
yum install python-pip python-devel

There is also FreeBSD port to install Glances on FreeBSD:
 

cd /usr/sysutils/py-glances
make install

Enjoy 🙂 !

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Tags: command line tools, information, Monitoring Disk, package, rpm, servers, system administration, terminal, update, www, yum

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2014 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Linux, Monitoring, System Administration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.