Last Updated on May 28, 2022
Summary
Glances is an excellent system administration tool that offers a smorgasbord amount of information in one single central place. There’s good use of colour which helps pertinent stats stand out.
Glances lets you export all system statistics to CSV, InfluxDB, Cassandra, OpenTSDB, StatsD, ElasticSearch or even RabbitMQ. There’s even a dedicated Grafana dashboard.
Glances is a monitoring tool only. For example, unlike top, it doesn’t currently let you kill an individual process. But in the next major release there are plans to add a new feature which will let you display the process list by pages, with the ability to navigate through the processes, and kill an individual process. This will be a very useful addition as currently it’s necessary to exit Glances and run a different command to kill a process, or fire up another terminal.
Glances’ memory footprint is smaller than gtop. Memory usage of Glances is approximately 67MB.
Website: nicolargo.github.io/glances
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Nicolas Hennion, Alessio Sergi, Floran Brutel, Brandon Philips, Jon Renner, Maxime Desbrus, Nicolas Hart, Sylvain Mouquet, Erik Eriksson, and many contributors
License: GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
Glances is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
All the essential tools in this series:
| Essential System Tools | |
|---|---|
| Alacritty | Innovative, hardware-accelerated terminal emulator |
| BleachBit | System cleaning software. Quick and easy way to service your computer |
| bottom | Graphical process/system monitor for the terminal |
| btop++ | Monitor usage and stats for CPU, memory, disks, network and processes |
| catfish | Versatile file searching software |
| Clonezilla | Partition and disk cloning software |
| CPU-X | System profiler with both a GUI and text-based |
| Czkawka | Find duplicate files, big files, empty files, similar images, and much more |
| ddrescue | Data recovery tool, retrieving data from failing drives as safely as possible |
| dust | More intuitive version of du written in Rust |
| f3 | Detect and fix counterfeit flash storage |
| Fail2ban | Ban hosts that cause multiple authentication errors |
| fdupes | Find or delete duplicate files |
| Firejail | Restrict the running environment of untrusted applications |
| Glances | Cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python |
| GParted | Resize, copy, and move partitions without data |
| GreenWithEnvy | NVIDIA graphics card utility |
| gtop | System monitoring dashboard |
| gWakeOnLAN | Turn machines on through Wake On LAN |
| hyperfine | Command-line benchmarking tool |
| HyFetch | System information tool written in Python |
| inxi | Command-line system information tool that's a time-saver for everyone |
| journalctl | Query and display messages from the journal |
| kmon | Manage Linux kernel modules with this text-based tool |
| Krusader | Advanced, twin-panel (commander-style) file manager |
| Nmap | Network security tool that builds a "map" of the network |
| nmon | Systems administrator, tuner, and benchmark tool |
| nnn | Portable terminal file manager that's amazingly frugal |
| pet | Simple command-line snippet manager |
| Pingnoo | Graphical representation for traceroute and ping output |
| ps_mem | Accurate reporting of software's memory consumption |
| SMC | Multi-featured system monitor written in Python |
| Timeshift | Reliable system restore tool |
| QDirStat | Qt-based directory statistics |
| QJournalctl | Graphical User Interface for systemd’s journalctl |
| TLP | Must-have tool for anyone running Linux on a notebook |
| Unison | Console and graphical file synchronization software |
| VeraCrypt | Strong disk encryption software |
| Ventoy | Create bootable USB drive for ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD(x), EFI files |
| WTF | Personal information dashboard for your terminal |