If you don't have a physical host available for testing, you can explore Glances on a virtual machine (VM), but you won't see the hardware sensors section after all, a VM has no real hardware. I suggest running Glances on a test machine while you try the commands in this article. If not, or if you are using a different operating system (such as Windows), or you just want to get it right from the source, you can find instructions for downloading and installing it in Glances' GitHub repo. Most Linux distributions (Fedora in my case) have Glances in their repositories. It can be installed on Windows and other hosts with current versions of Python installed.

Glances is cross-platform because it is written in Python.

If you read my previous article, some of this information may be familiar, but you should also find some new things here. I mentioned Glances in my article 4 open source tools for Linux system monitoring, but I will delve into it more deeply in this article. However, Glances also monitors filesystem I/O, network I/O, and sensor readouts that can display CPU and other hardware temperatures as well as fan speeds and disk usage by hardware device and logical volume.

All of these tools monitor CPU and memory usage, and most of them list information about running processes (at the very least). A few years ago, I found Glances, a tool that displays information that none of my other favorites do. For me, these primarily used to be top, atop, and htop. Sysadmins have many tools to view and manage running processes.

Memory monitoring in linux