Introduction
Invented in 1991 by Finnish coder ‘Linus Torvalds’ to build a new and free OS kernel, Linux has come a long way. Today, it comprises a giant community with several lines of codes spread across multiple channels, crafted for special use.
It has now become a go-to platform for developers working both on on-premise and cloud infrastructures. It is all because of its crucial customizability, low-resource requirement, reliability, and security, among others.
However, when Linux machines are poorly configured, their designs often leave them paralyzed. As a result, packages from several contributors collide, cron job fails, and hardware-related issues occur.
Hence, it becomes essential to have a Linux monitoring tool as it helps to prevent these issues or spot any issues immediately. In this blog, we have listed some of the best tools to monitor the linux system and reporting tool. So, dive deep into it to choose the best option for your infrastructure.
Best Linux System Monitoring Tools
As you all know that monitoring your Linux system plays a crucial role. So, we have come up with some Linux system and network monitoring tools, providing complete observability, from open-source and freemium to enterprise-ready solutions. Let’s take a look at them:
Log Tail
With the help of LogTail, you can monitor the Linux system systematically and efficiently. It provides well-written documents and community guides for Linux Logging with which you can monitor your Linux system at any time.
Moreover, it allows you to collect, analyze, transport, store, monitor, and archive logs from the entire cloud infrastructure. You can also query your logs similarly to the way you query your database with SQL-compatible structured log management. You can search and filter logs’ petabytes and set an anomaly detection alert to receive alerts when your logs become ordinary.
Lastly, LogTail’s built-in collaboration features enable you to cooperate with your colleagues in a Google doc-like environment and save, share, and archive parts of code.
Htop
Another Linux system performance monitoring gui tool is htop. This ncurses-based process viewer is an improved and advanced version of the Top command. Although its features are similar to that of the Top’s, it offers additional bells and whistles. It includes an intuitive and interactive UI, vertical and horizontal view for processes, and short-key support, among others.
The Head, body, and foot divide its layout into three sections. These sections categorize and present all system resources and usage statistics. It enables you to navigate the data effortlessly. However, since it is a third-party tool, it does not constitutes Linux distros. Therefore, you need to install them separately into your system.
GkrellM
GkrellM is a GTK+ toolkit performance monitoring tool. With the help of this tool, you can monitor multiple real-time system resources. You can access stackable UI, meaning it enables you to put unlimited monitoring objects on top of one another. Moreover, you can configure it to ‘stay on top of other windows.’ This way, you can always identify the usage statistics.
GkrellM monitors all the basic objects like CPU usage, bandwidth, memory usage, etc. However, you can include additional plugins to manage external applications. It also provides themes to customize and match the appearance of your window manager, GTK, as well as your desktop environment.
Conky
Conky is a system monitoring program for Linux and BSD running on GUI. With this tool, you can monitor multiple system resources and report the current CPU usage, disk storage, memory, users logged in, temperatures, etc., on your screen. As a result, you will have an immediate glance at the way your computer components are being used.
Hence, Conky is highly customizable, has widgets that fit well with any desktop theme, and shows various system information.
Sematext
Sematext is one of the Linux system and network monitoring tools with which you can monitor servers and applications in consolidated monitoring tools. It collects metrics and visualizes them in comprehensive dashboards so that you can observe the entire state of your infrastructure. It also monitors server processes and system packages, among others.
You can acquire a complete ecosystem of monitoring tools in one place with sematext. This way, you can troubleshoot your system, correlate data, detect anomalies, and improve performance. It collects every server-related metric required.
The best thing about Sematext is that it provides you with a 14-day free trial and lets you explore it entirely.
Nagios
Nagios is one of the top-rated and most sturdy open-source monitoring tools used to track every system resource. Network and system administrators use this tool to monitor and resolve network-related issues before any problems occur.
It constitutes a daemon, which aggregates information on multiple processes. It is performed either on your system or a remote host. From remote Linux and Windows systems to printers or routers, you can monitor about anything.
After collecting all the information, it neatly represents them in a user-friendly web-based interface. You can even set essential thresholds for various servers running on the server. When it exceeds the time limit, it generates a warning to the system admin or technical team to immediately pitch and fix it.
GNOME System Monitor
GNOME provides an efficient prepackaged default system monitoring tool that users can probably suffice. It mitigates the need for downloading additional tools. With the help of this monitor the linux and reporting tool, you can see all the currently running processes on the system and sort them by multiple fields. It also offers a resource monitor for a graphical view of the system resource usage.
Therefore, in GNOME, you get the Linux system monitoring tool installed by default. It consists of sortable process lists and a graphical view of system resource usage.
Datadog
With Datadog’s server monitoring software, you can collect, correlate, and monitor servers along with data from the rest of your stack. Because of their full-stack monitoring tool, you can accelerate your server monitoring with related metrics, traces, and logs. This way, investigating server issues at the individual host level, identifying hidden sources of latency, and visualizing server metrics becomes effortless.
Datadog provides you with 450+ key integrations. It involves AWS, Docker, or Azure. It makes this tool a very versatile partner for server monitoring.
Stacer
Stacer is a feature-rich tool for performance and monitoring and system enhancements. It constitutes a clean and modern GUI, along with a head-up display showcasing entire usage statistics for CPU, Memory, Disk, Upload, and Download speed for your Internet connections.
It also enables you to different system services and processes. You can even enable and disable them directly from the app. Overall, this app is appropriate both for system administrators and casual users. The fact that it is entirely free makes it the most suitable tool for monitoring servers.
New Relic
With New Relic infrastructure monitoring, you acquire faster visibility and troubleshooting. It’s an all-in-one data observation tool that correlates and drill-down certain log tracing processes in just a few steps. Moreover, since it is highly adjustable, you can run from one or multiple on-premise clouds. It provides you access to specific, accurate, and custom metrics in real time.
It is also an open and flexible integration network supporting all the most popular integrations like AWS, Azure, Kafka, etc. Therefore, if you find an unsupported integration, the New Relic integration builder enables you to build it from scratch.
Conclusion
So, these are some of our picks for the best Linux system performance monitoring GUI tools. These tools provide you immediate insight on how to use the system’s hardware resource and other information like which users are logged in.
Also Read: Top 5 Linux Distributions for Beginners!
