Sysmon – A Linux System Monitor (Like Windows Task Manager)

One of the most useful software in Microsoft Windows OS is Task Manager. It is a powerful application that shows a Windows system's overall performance and resource usage. Of course, there are so many system resource monitoring programs available for Linux platform. But none of them had the look and feel of Windows 8/10 Task manager. Also, most of them still lacks one or two features. For instance, some system monitors doesn't show the Hard disk and GPU usage details in graphs. Luckily, today I stumbled upon a Linux system monitor named Sysmon.

What is Sysmon?

Sysmon is a graphical system monitoring tool for Linux. It shows the usage information about CPU, GPU, Memory, HDD/SDD, network interface cards and overview of running processes in a nice graphical layout, just like Windows Task manager. It monitors the CPU, GPU, Memory, Network, and Disks in real time and displays all the details in a clean and simple GUI.

Sysmon is free and open source application written in Python programming language.

Install Sysmon On Linux

Sysmon depends on two python packages namely pyqtgraph and pyqt5. You can install those libraries using Pip like below.

$ pip install pyqtgraph pyqt5

If you have Nvidia GPU, you need to install nvidia-smi to monitor it's usage.

After installing aforementioned dependencies, run the following command to install sysmon:

$ pip install sysmon

And launch it by running the following command:

$ sysmon

Alternatively, git clone the Sysmon's repository using command:

$ git clone https://github.com/MatthiasSchinzel/sysmon.git

The above command clones the contents of sysmon github repository in a local folder named sysmon in the current working directory.

Go to the sysmon/src directory:

$ cd sysmon/src/

And launch Sysmon program using the following command:

$ python sysmon.py

How to use Sysmon graphical system monitor

The default interface of Sysmon looks like below.

As you can see, the look and feel of sysmon resembles to Windows Task manager.

Sysmon gets most of the data from /proc directory in your Linux system. It retrieves the following details:

• the CPU usage details from /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/stat,
• Memory usage from /proc/meminfo,
• Disks usage from /proc/diskstats,
• Network usage /proc/net/dev and iwconfig
• and overview of running processes from ps aux command.

CPU and Memory overview by Sysmon:

Network and Disks overview by Sysmon:

Of course, Gnome's System Monitor displays the resource usage in graphs. However, it doesn't shows the HDD/SSD load.

Sysmon is very new project. It works just fine on my Ubuntu 20.04 LTS desktop. Hope the developer will add more features in the days to come.

Resource:

• Sysmon GitHub Repository