13 Linux Performance Monitoring Tools

If you’re working as a Linux/Unix system administrator, sure you know that you must have useful monitoring tools to monitor your computers & systems, monitoring tools are very important in the job of a system administrator or a server webmaster, it’s the best way to keep an eye on what’s going on inside your system.

Today we’re going to talk about another 13 Linux monitoring tool that you may use to do the job.

21. Glances – Real Time System Monitoring

Glances is a monitoring tool built to present as much information as possible in any terminal size, it automatically takes the terminal window size it runs on, in other words, it’s a responsive monitoring tool.

Features

1. Licensed under LGPL and written in Python.
2. Cross-platform, it works on Windows, Mac, BSD and Linux.
3. Available in most Linux official repositories.
4. A It gives a lot of information about your system.
5. Built using curses.

Read More: Install Glances on RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian

22. Sarg – Squid Bandwidth Monitoring

Sarg (Squid Analysis Report Generator) is a free & open-source tool which act as a monitoring tool for your Squid proxy server, it creates reports about your Squid proxy server users, IP addresses, the sites they visit beside some other information.

Features of Sarg

1. Licensed under GPL 2 and available in many languages.
2. Works under Linux & FreeBSD.
3. Generates report in HTML format.
4. Very easy to install & use.

Read More: Install Sarg “Squid Bandwidth Monitoring” Tool in Linux

23. Apache Status Monitoring

Apache Module mod_status is an Apache server module that allows you to monitor the workers status of the Apache server. It generates a report in an easy to read HTML format. It shows you the status of all the workers, how much CPU each one using, and what requests are currently handled and number of working and not working workers.

Read More: Apache Web Server Load and Page Statistics Monitoring

24. Monit – Linux Process and Services Monitoring

Monit is a nice program that monitors your Linux & Unix server, it can monitor everything you have on your server, from the main server (Apache, Nginx..) to files permissions, files hashes and web services. Plus a lot of things.

Features of Monit

1. Free & open-source, released under AGPL and written in C.
2. It can be started from the command line interface or via its special web interface.
3. Very effective in monitoring all the software on your system and services.
4. A nice web interface with beautiful charts for CPU and RAM usage.
5. Monit can automatically take actions in emergency situations.
6. A lot more..

Read More: Install Monit Tool in RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian

25. Sysstat – All-in-One System Performance Monitoring

Another monitoring tool for your Linux system. Sysstat is not a real command in fact, it’s just the name of the project, Sysstat in fact is a package that includes many performance monitoring tools like iostat, sadf, pidstat beside many other tools which shows you many statistics about your Linux OS.

Features of Sysstat

1. Available in many Linux distributions repositories by default.
2. Ability to create statistics about RAM, CPU, SWAP usage. Beside the ability to monitor Linux kernel activity, NFS server, Sockets, TTY and filesystems.
3. Ability to monitor input & output statistics for devices, tasks.. etc.
4. Ability to output reports about network interfaces and devices, with support for IPv6.
5. Sysstat can show you the power statistics (usage, devices, the fans speed.. etc) as well.
6. Many other features..

Read More: Install Sysstat in Linux and 20 Useful Commands of Sysstat

26. Icinga – Next Generation Server Monitoring

Unlike the other tools, Icinga is a network monitoring program, it shows you many options and information about your network connections, devices and processes, it’s a very good choice for those who are looking for a good tool to monitor their networking stuffs.

Features of Icinga

1. Icinga is also free and open-source.
2. Very functional in monitoring everything you may have in networking.
3. Support for MySQL and PostgreSQL is included.
4. Real-time monitoring with A nice web interface.
5. Very expendable with modules and extensions.
6. Icinga supports applying services and actions to hosts.
7. A lot more to discover..

Read More: Install Icinga in RHEL/CentOS 7/6

27. Observium – Network Management and Monitoring

Observium is also a network monitoring tool, it was designed to help you manage your network of servers easily, there are 2 versions from it; Community Edition which is free & open-source and Commercial version which costs £150/year.

Features of Observium

1. Written in PHP with MySQL database support.
2. Has a nice web interface to output information and data.
3. Ability to manage and monitor hundreds of hosts worldwide.
4. The community version from it is licensed under QPL license.
5. Works on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and more.

Read More: Observium – Network Management and Monitoring Tool for RHEL/CentOS

28. Web VMStat – System Statistics Monitoring

Web VMStat is a very simple web application programmer, that provides a real time system information usage, from CPU to RAM, Swap and input/output information in html format.

Read More: Web VMStat: A Real Time System Statistics Tool for Linux

29. PHP Server Monitoring

Unlike the other tools on this list, PHP Server Monitoring is a web script written in PHP that helps you to manage you websites and hosts easily, it supports MySQL database and is released under GPL 3 or later.

Features

1. A nice web interface.
2. Ability to send notifications to you via Email & SMS.
3. Ability to view the most important information about CPU and RAM.
4. A very modern logging system to log connection errors and emails that are sent.
5. Support for cronjob services to help you monitor your servers and websites automatically.

Read More: Install PHP Server Monitoring Tool in Arch Linux

30. Linux Dash – Linux Server Performance Monitoring

From its name, “Linux Dash” is a web dashboard that shows you the most important information about your Linux systems such as RAM, CPU, file-system, running processes, users, bandwidth usage in real time, it has a nice GUI and it’s free & open-source.

Read More: Install Linux Dash (Linux Performance Monitoring) Tool in Linux

31. Cacti – Network and System Monitoring

Cacti is nothing more than a free & open-source web interface for RRDtool, it is used often to monitor the bandwidth using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), it can be used also to monitor CPU usage.

Features of Cacti

1. Free & open-source, released under GPL license.
2. Written in PHP with PL/SQL.
3. A cross-platform tool, it works on Windows and Linux.
4. User management; you may create different users accounts for Cacti.

Read More: Install Cacti Network and System Monitoring Tool in Linux

32. Munin – Network Monitoring

Munin is also a web interface GUI for RRDtool, it was written in Perl and licensed under GPL, Munin is a good tool to monitor systems, networks, applications and services. It works on all Unix-like operating systems and has a nice plugin system; there are 500 different plugin available to monitor anything you want on your machine. A notifications system is available to send messages to the administrator when there’s an error or when the error is resolved.

Read More: Install Munin Network Monitoring Tool in Linux

33. Wireshark – Network Protocol Analyzer

Also, unlike all the other tools on our list, Wireshark is an analyzer desktop program which is used to analyze network packets and to monitor network connections. It’s written in C with the GTK+ library and released under the GPL license.

Features

1. Cross-platform: it works on Linux, BSD , Mac OS X and Windows.
2. Command line support: there’s a command line based version from Wireshark to analyze data.
3. Ability to capture VoIP calls, USB traffic, network data easily to analyze it.
4. Available in most Linux distributions repositories.

Read More: Install Wireshark – Network Protocol Analyzer Tool in Linux

These were the most important tools to monitor your Linux/Unix machines, of course there are many other tools, but these are the most famous.

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