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I'm looking for some type of remote linux monitoring software that you can view using a web interface. And I'm not just looking for the basic load information. I'm also looking for process information, similar to the info that you get from TOP. Like I'd just like to be able to pop open this webpage to view whats going on with the server at a moments notice.

For example, perhaps just a basic PHP page that is on the server that uses basic AJAX to display and refresh results from the TOP command in the page.

I was thinking about writing something like this, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

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closed as off-topic by MDMarra, cole, Dave M, Jenny D, squillman Nov 21 '13 at 16:56


  • "Questions seeking product, service, or learning material recommendations are off-topic because they tend to become obsolete quickly. Instead, describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve." – MDMarra, cole, Dave M, Jenny D, squillman

6 Answers 6

up vote 4 down vote accepted

+1 for Cacti.

Try also Nagios - the default set of monitors are pretty capable, but it's supports modules that will extend it in nearly every direction; in particular, you can monitor the output of arbitrary shell commands.

Worst case, if you needs are simple, then just roll your own. Most of the servers I manage have a /cgi-bin/status.cgi that spits back the output of:

  • w
  • top -l1
  • mysql -u readonly_user 'show full processlist;'
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We use a combination of self-hosted solutions like Cacti and Nagios together with managed solutions like ServerDensity.

ServerDensity has the great benefit of being incredible easy to setup and it has snapshots, which allows you to go back to a moment in time and see how your server was doing.

It also has builtin e-mail, iPhone push and SMS monitoring.

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Take a look at Cacti.

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There are performance monitoring tools like munin, cacti, zenoss (prf mon is just 1 feature) that will do what your looking for and much more. Although from your wording I am unclear whether you are looking for something like that or something more "realtime" with no historical information per se. In which case I got nothin for ya, sorry!

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None of the previous responses really answer your question. It sounds like you just want a simple webserver app that runs top once and displays the output. None of the aforementioned monitoring products meet your requirements.

Personally, I don't know of such a thing. Probably because a) it's silly and b) it's probably written in-house all the time but not considered worthy of publishing for others to use. You could whip something like this up in php in a few minutes.

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+1 for Cacti as well, but since I don't see it mentioned, I'd say take a look at kSar. It has the benefit of not requiring anything but sar (very low impact) and ssh running.

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