GKrellM

GKrellM is a powerful graphical system monitor. It integrates in a compact view a lot of customizable informations, like sensors, CPU/memory load, filesystems usage, network traffic and so on. Every feature comes with customizable alarms and with the opportunity to run some personal script (to send a mail, stop a process, restart a service, etc) when critical situations occur.

A lot of official and unofficial plugins are available, for special tasks and fun. Many plugins are in the portage tree and many more are listed on the developer site.

Very powerful, GKrellM comes with a daemon that can be ran on a remote machine (i.e. a server deep in a cellar or far in the world) to monitor it from your wide-screen box.

If you want to try another program similar to GKrellM you can read about Conky. Many users love Conky, because of the elegant interface and the textual configuration; but Conky cannot monitor remote (and therefore multiple) machines.

Installation
GKrellM comes with some interesting USE flags:

is required if you are installing GKrellM in your monitoring box; it is not necessary if you are installing GKrellM in your monitored machine. is very useful as graphical interface and alarm manager for hardware sensors.

Execute in your flavour:

and

Configuration
If you emerged GKrellm with the lm_sensors USE flag, you have to configure the lm_sensors before, to activate and tune up your motherboard sensors. Similarly, if you emerged with the hddtemp USE flag, you should setup hddtemp before.

There are many configuration options available via graphical interface and they are very easy to find and understand. Hopefully, you don't need any special explanation. Be sure to note the detailed filesystem tool, that can be a graphical replacement of the df command and a notification system.

Every monitor comes with a warning level and an alarm level. The built-in warning and alarm task is a weak animation, but you can run (and repeat) a command to take an action against the problem.

Remote monitoring
If you want to monitor a remote machine from a local machine, you have to run the gkrellmd daemon on the remote machine. The configuration is quite easy and the default values will work.

Once done, start the daemon:

If you want the daemon starts automatically when the machine starts:

To monitor the remote system, just call the GKrellM program with the -s option from your local box:

External resources

 * GKrellM developer page
 * Browse some screenshots at muhri site
 * Screenshot about the graphical power of GKrellM at Linuxcs.org
 * Check the Conky alternative at Conky