---
date: "2025-06-14T04:00:00-07:00"
title: "TUI Challenge: Day 7"
tags: ["cli","tui"]
categories: ["personal","sa"]
#image: ""
series: ["tuichallenge"]
summary: "This is the end, my friend"
---

# Day 7: System Monitoring
Today's task was around system monitoring which is something I have used before as I do not have any GUI system
monitoring apps installed.

![clockwise, top left: glances, trippy, btm, btop](/uploads/2025/06/tui-challenge-day-7.webp "clockwise, top left:
glances, trippy, bottom, btop") _clockwise, top left: [glances](https://github.com/nicolargo/glances),
[trippy](https://github.com/fujiapple852/trippy/), [bottom](https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom),
[btop](https://github.com/aristocratos/btop)_

Most of the time, when you laptop/server is running great, you do not worry about what is running or how much CPU/RAM is
being consumed.  But, then you notice that program start-up seemed awfully slow or that remote site was a bit slow or
did not respond at all.  What now?  Monitoring tools to the rescue!

## [glances](https://github.com/nicolargo/glances)
I just found this tool recently.  It gives a great overview of not just what process are running, but how your network
interfaces are doing, disk i/o as well as filesystem usage, and an overview of the IRQ in use.  Truly, your system at a
glance. The only metric it is missing for me is temperature of the CPU and drives.

## [trippy](https://github.com/fujiapple852/trippy/)
Trippy is another new find for me.  It is traceroute, but all TUI up.  It is easy to read, has a stop-light icon on the
far right to let you know the status of each hop.  Nice.

## [bottom](https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom)
Bottom is another system resource monitor, but instead of just columns of numbers, you get a real-time chart of CPU,
RAM, and network usage, along with an overview of system tempatures, disk usage (but not disk I/O), and a process
overview.  This is a great tool to leave up running while you are trying to track down some issue as you can see the
historical trends.

## [btop](https://github.com/aristocratos/btop)
btop is my go-to top replacement. I even have a bash alias for top calling btop: `alias top=btop` and a key sequence 
for my tmux config to call it up: `bind '~' split-window "exec btop"`.  btop shows the same types of information as
bottom, but goes into more details.  Disk display, for example, has not just space used but disk I/O as well.  It
offers a lot of configuration options.  For example, in the above picture, it is using the catppuccin_mocha theme to
match the rest of my desktop, both GUI and TUI apps.  Nice.

## Challenge
The challenge today was to use the tools at least twice and note an observation.  In the above picture, I was just
starting a NixOS update and rebuild, so you can see the CPU, RAM, and network starting to get used more.

## Daily totals
[Yesterday](/posts/2025/06/tui-challenge-day-6/) left me with 155 points. Today's basic challenge was worth 10 points,
with a bonus of 5 points for customizing the display of the tool (btop's theme).  I did not do the other bonus of
scripting alerts as I already have another system for that.  So, 15 points today, brings the total to 170.

## Challenge Bonus points
There is a bonus 30 points up for grabs if I use a terminal multiplexer.  As seen in the picture above, that is tmux
with the first pane split into four to show the tools off, but I also have panes for my email, RSS reader, mastodon
client, and ssh shells on a couple other machines.

And for added geek points:
```
[don@loki:~] $ tmux list-sessions
chat: 2 windows (created Sat Jun 14 22:34:14 2025)
duckland: 3 windows (created Sat Jun 14 22:44:28 2025) (attached)
loki: 5 windows (created Sat Jun 14 22:29:16 2025)
nixos: 2 windows (created Sat Jun 14 22:29:49 2025)
```

Which brings my grand total to 200!