Show HN: Real-time server monitoring in your browser

It's always instantly clear when something like iTunes or a Chrome helper starts eating up 105% CPU, and provides quick access to force quitting it. :)

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/sEtkR9p.png

k02• 12 years ago

flexd, Htop or conky? http://conky.sourceforge.net/

acl...nice job. Your site looks nice and works nice.

flexd3• 12 years ago

I've never actually used conky. I'd never see it, I rarely notice my wallpaper because I never see my desktop.

qq66• 12 years ago

Nice. The play/pause should be one button that changes icon -- the current setup is a little confusing.

wingerlang• 12 years ago

I'd just like to add that I fully agree. It's a confusing setup as it is now.

acl4• 12 years ago

ah - thanks for the feedback, makes sense.

dmdavis• 12 years ago

I will add that if you keep it as two buttons, the colors should be switched. Right now, the active button is black and the other is gray. But gray buttons say to me that they are disabled, so it looks like I can only hit the play button when it's already playing.

steve02• 12 years ago

Nice, but it requires ruby :S

I been using this https://github.com/abimaelmartell/system_monitor, easy to install and dont eat too much ram :P

abimaelmartell2• 12 years ago

[2014-03-10 15:04:45] ERROR TypeError: nil can't be coerced into Fixnum server_metrics-1.2.0/lib/server_metrics/collectors/memory.rb:81:in `+'

Getting this error under OSX

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

Here as well, running with Ruby 2.0.0.

itsderek2311• 12 years ago

Sorry - mind sharing the output of "top -l1 -n0 -u"? Looks like an issue parsing out the memory stats on OSX.

wahnfrieden2• 12 years ago

Sorry to be the one posting a tangent (looks like a nice tool!), but please rewrite "for the modern man" to something more gender neutral.

tg3• 12 years ago

I agree with this. I know "for the modern man" is an idiom, but I think it's better to be overly conscious about this stuff. Would you lose anything by saying "for the modern dev"?

theknown99• 12 years ago

Political correctness is such a depressing drain on the world. Leave it how it is. It's fine.

Reminds me of when they tried to rename Manholes to "Personnel Access Units" to avoid offending women.

If you're offended that something is named a 'manhole', you probably have too much time on your hands.

kibibu4• 12 years ago

Let me guess, you're a man?

simplify• 12 years ago

The word "manhole" is not a fair comparison. In that case they were dealing with an inanimate object. In this case, we're labeling any developer who would need this tool. Hence the inappropriate use of gender.

dovel• 12 years ago

What if a website with nursing resources was subtitled "...for the caring woman"?

yahelc2• 12 years ago

The landing page is on the gh-pages branch of the repo. I filed an issue for it here: https://github.com/scoutapp/scout_realtime/issues/6

Only reason I didn't file a PR myself was I wasn't sure what the best replacement would be (dev? sysadmin?), but this should be easy enough to fix if they're amenable.

EDIT: "Developer" as an alternative was merged very quickly. https://github.com/scoutapp/scout_realtime/pull/7

the1• 12 years ago

Sorry to be the one posting a tangent looks like a nice patch! But please rewrite "for the modern developer" to something more career neutral.

I'm a systems architect. I feel like I am not invited to use the tool.

wcchandler• 12 years ago

I can't tell if you're trolling or not...

The use of man in this context is androgynous. It's merely an abbreviated use of "mankind," which is an abbreviated use of "humankind." I'm sorry if you're upset by this wording, but it's not inappropriate.

mbreese• 12 years ago

No, you're right... it's not inappropriate. But really, something like "for the modern admin" is more appropriate and should be used. There is no need for the "modern man", so it should be left out.

The phrase of "modern man" was meant to contrast with old-school admins. For me, it brought up images of classic admins in server rooms either your straight-laced IBM types or your Berkeley Unix neckbeards. Take your pick, but they were both predominantly men.

yahelc2• 12 years ago

"for the modern man" is a very gendered idiomatic phrase unrelated to mankind.

https://www.google.com/search?q="for+the+modern+man"

Note how all of the results are all about men and manliness, which is fine for gendered products and clothing, but doesn't really make sense for a piece of server monitoring software.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

re: "for the modern man"

The use of man in this context is androgynous.

No, its not, even if it was intended that way.

It's merely an abbreviated use of "mankind," which is an abbreviated use of "humankind."

"Humankind", "Mankind" (and "man" when used in a sense that is semantically-equivalent to the other two) are mass nouns that do not take articles ("the" or "a"). In the case of "humankind" or "mankind", using an article is just plain incorrect (consider, "one giant leap for the mankind" vs. "one giant leap for mankind"), whereas for "man" the use of an article can distinguish between the sense of "an individual adult male human" and "humankind" (consider "the story of man" vs. "the story of a man".)

So, no, in "for the modern man", "man" doesn't work as a shortened form of "mankind".

twerquie• 12 years ago

You're thinking of "modern man", not "the modern man".

tobych• 12 years ago

That's the first thing I thought. Please, please change it. Things are difficult enough for women in technology without things like that. I don't care what the rational is. It looks awful, and I'd be embarrassed to show that to women at work.

victorhooi2• 12 years ago

I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or not...lol...

It's a little too earnest - I think you may have overdone it...haha - too obvious.

Good job though.

victorhooi2• 12 years ago

Look, I'm all for encouraging more girls in STEM, and all that.

My EE class mostly guys, and I'm sure we lost some diversity of viewpoints because of that.

However, let's just ask nicely once - and then leave it at that.

I would hate this to turn into another silly bike shedding flamewars on HN, where all the Social Justice Warriors come out of the woodwork, for their weekly feel-good topup.

girvo• 12 years ago

Too late.

acl4• 12 years ago

Project author here. We don't want to exclude anyone - I updated it to "developers."

jggonz• 12 years ago

Quick question. How much CPU usage/time does the monitoring tool itself utilize ?

bashinator• 12 years ago

I'm a sysadmin - can I still use your tool?

mongrelion• 12 years ago

Have you thought of writing the metrics collection part (and eventually the whole thing) in Go? You would get the stand-alone distribution right away and would keep people from installing any extra dependencies.

EDIT: Fixed typo.

sergiotapia• 12 years ago

http://gfycat.com/JealousCloseAsiaticlesserfreshwaterclam

jasallen• 12 years ago

Just change it to "modern woman" and shut everyone up.

That's the thing now right? Where the english language has left us with lack of a non-awkward sounding gender neutral term we just the feminine version and it's ok. I know, I know, everyone is going to chime in with their version of a 'non-awkward sounding alternative. But the person who wrote this, wrote it, it didn't go to the committee of HN, and that person wasn't out to offend anyone, so ya know, let it go, let live, all that... No? I tried.

k02• 12 years ago

How about ...for the modern admin?

atmosx• 12 years ago

Can you guys add a if/else clause in sinatra and add a FreeBSD logo?[1]

I see tux in my FreeBSD server and feels weird.

[1] https://github.com/scoutapp/scout_realtime/blob/master/lib/s...

ps. My photo-editing skills suck bigtime otherwise I'd do it.

EDIT: Doesn't seem to work properly under FreeBSD-10. No data is displayed. Apparently (as expected) uses Linux ProcFS structure to get data. So FreeBSD for now is not supported, keep the icon for later :-)

stock_toaster2• 12 years ago

I wonder if it can use the linproc compat stuff like htop does on FreeBSD.

itsderek2311• 12 years ago

Sorry - no FreeBSD support yet.

jahaja• 12 years ago

I've recently released a similar tool for Python. Definitely not as pretty but with a focus on providing a lot of details: https://github.com/Jahaja/psdash

The more the merrier! :)

nodesocket• 12 years ago

For all my fellow CentOS/RHEL users here is a quick bash script for getting it running (assumes you don't have ruby 1.9 installed).

    # Install RVM and Ruby 1.9.3
    curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
    source /etc/profile.d/rvm.sh
    rvm install 1.9.3

    # Install JSON gem
    gem install json

    # Install Scout realtime
    gem install scout_realtime

    # Start Scout realtime
    scout_realtime

    # Punch a hole in iptables on port 5555 for Scout realtime
    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 5555 -j ACCEPT
    service iptables save
    service iptables restart

byroot• 12 years ago

You don't need to install json on 1.9.3, it's already in the stdlib http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/json/rdoc/index.html

adfadf• 12 years ago

curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

no.

stock_toaster2• 12 years ago

Looks nice, but it slowly turns my laptop into a fireball and pegs an entire core (older laptop).

itsderek2311• 12 years ago

Sorry. Just FYI, we've clocked the CPU usage of the scout_realtime daemon at 1% on an Intel Xeon 2.40GHz CPU.

ibejoeb• 12 years ago

I think we're talking about the browser side of things. I haven't investigated why, but it pegs the cpu on my macbook pro in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

It seems pretty light on the server side.

hartator• 12 years ago

Anyone with a link to a live demo?

ehPReth• 12 years ago

http://scoutapp.com:5555/

jakejake• 12 years ago

They said they use it on their own production servers so of course I couldn't resist... http://scoutapp.com:5555/

Really nice looking monitoring, though. I think it's fun to see the stats scrolling by.

acl4• 12 years ago

Ha yeah - we opened up a port in iptables for this so we don't have to ssh tunnel in to see stats. Obviously, if you're concerned about exposing numbers, you can view via an ssh tunnel instead of opening a port.

cmbaus3• 12 years ago

I see you are using SVG to render the charts. What are your thoughts on SVG vs Canvas for these types of apps?

kbar13• 12 years ago

that 2.6 kernel tho

rubiquity• 12 years ago

Interesting that they are using kernel version 2.6.32-35. Is it common to run such an older kernel version on servers?

dangrossman• 12 years ago

2.6.32 is one of the longterm maintenance releases; it's still supported and new security patches are backported. If you rent a freshly imaged RHEL/CentOS server today, that's the kernel you'll be getting. Pretty much all the software packages those distro's come with are older, longterm/stable releases, never bleeding edge.

benjamincburns2• 12 years ago

Did you roll your own SVG chart lib for this? If not, mind sharing which one you're using? It's very nice.

If you were to make it so I can open a socket or websocket to it (perhaps on a second, internal port) and publish whatever data I want, that'd be all kinds of nifty. That is, make it so I can just start spraying numbers at ws://myhost:5556/Really%20Awesome%20Data and with that a nice auto-scaled chart magically appears in the dashboard.

Edit: Oh, I see a github ribbon. Maybe you'll see a pull request sometime soon...

Edit 2: Anyone wondering about my original question - the charts are built using the D3 project.

http://d3js.org/

gvickers• 12 years ago

I've been searching for something like that for a while now. A metrics web framework that consumes and renders json/edn would be interesting.

Gigablah3• 12 years ago

I've been using shopify/dashing for metrics display:

http://shopify.github.io/dashing/

You can post JSON directly to each widget. It's also based on Sinatra.

Someone already created a widget for Rickshaw graphs, I suppose it could be adapted to use D3.js.

itsderek2311• 12 years ago

Our source for the charts is here: https://github.com/scoutapp/scout_realtime/blob/master/lib/s...

It's not yet in a state for plug-and-play usage in other projects. If you're looking to rollout smooth-scrolling charts quickly, checkout http://smoothiecharts.org/.

vpanyam• 12 years ago

I just built this yesterday: http://blog.vivekpanyam.com/plotter-plot-anything/. Inspired by Tasseo and Scout Realtime

benjamincburns2• 12 years ago

Cheers! If this were a "Show HN" I'd be happy to upvote! Edit: I see now that it kinda/sorta was, and I missed the opportunity.

garthk• 12 years ago

I'm glad to see the sparklines. I'm worried that the CPU sparklines in particular are likely to mislead due to the lack of a common vertical axis scale. I suspect Tufte might advise two graphs: one with a fixed 0…100 axis scale, one "zoomed". The former would help you compare CPU history between apps, and sport a shaded background region to indicate the range of the latter.

itsderek2311• 12 years ago

Good points. Thanks!

jonahx• 12 years ago

Does this solve the same problem that new relic does? If not, what is the difference?

keimoon• 12 years ago

It is burning my CPU (browser side, not server side) http://i.imgur.com/NgXi4LG.png The author should provide configuration so it does not get data from stats.json every second.

lcfg• 12 years ago

Cool idea! The interface is a tad heavy (for me) though, the fans of my laptop spun up.

I noticed that by looking at the memory usage of the ssh daemon, one can determine how many people are connected with ssh. Every open connection (even if you're just idling at the login phase) adds around three to five mb to memory use. I wonder what other information might be unintentionally relayed through these metrics.

sdesol2• 12 years ago

This is cool. It looks like the developers are reading the comments so I'll add a quick suggestion. Something that I found to be insanely helpful with my own product development was being able to track memory swapping.

I went to great lengths to tune my Java Virtual Machines so that they would work well in a minimum RAM environment. And being able to track swapping was critical for my decision making. Now I can run my product on a 512MB system with 1GB of swap space with no problem. Below is how I'm tracking swapping in real-time.

http://screenshots.gitsense.com/track-swapping.html

Since your solution is focused on capturing a period of time, you'll be able to provide a better view than I am.

With SSD becoming more common for cloud hosting, using swap space in lieu of getting more RAM will probably become more common. And before anybody points out that SSD is still significantly slower than RAM, I know. Depending on your product, using swap on SSD may be practical. I know using swap on amazon's infrastructure wasn't.

itsderek2311• 12 years ago

Part of the scout_realtime team here...swap is important. Displaying it the future is possible.

In fact, fire up the console on the project homepage and type "metrics.memory". We're capturing it, just not displaying it yet on the screen.

sdesol2• 12 years ago

"We're capturing it,"

This is good to hear. Not sure what would be the best way to display that information though.

hnriot• 12 years ago

kills the cpu on my mac with Chrome Version 34.0.1847.11 beta

mrcozz• 12 years ago

I'm working on a similar project, called dtop, check it out at https://github.com/ddierickx/dtop!

ireflect2• 12 years ago

This is wonderful: No runtime required, minimal footprint, and almost no overhead when UI is idle.

tijs• 12 years ago

I just tried out the main product and while it's easy to setup i ran into snags with the plugins right away. Both redis and postgres (the first two i tried) failed to install and it took a bit of searching to figure out they had their own dependencies. When trying to install those dependencies i ran into issues with compatibility for a fresh ruby install.

Maybe you should concentrate on fixing your own dependency issues before you start pounding on Nagios (https://scoutapp.com/info/nagios_alternative) about the exact same issue.

72deluxe• 12 years ago

Looks good. If you want to monitor network throughput on the CLI, use nload. It's great.

rootuid• 12 years ago

Looks bloody nice, got it up and running http://www.coldfusion10.com/installing-scout-realtime-on-cen...

Therac20• 12 years ago

Any way of enforcing HTTPS and login/password auth? I would love to be able to use this on a set of public servers...

davidradcliffe• 12 years ago

A simple proxy through nginx should do the trick.

wazoox2• 12 years ago

The web page makes firefox gobbles more and more RAM until it crashes. You've found a firefox bug :) (FF 27.1 Linux).

k3oni• 12 years ago

This looks nice but that /s refresh it might cause issues, maybe add a setting so refresh can be set by user?

Shameless plug - If anyone is looking for a python/django alternative with refresh settings and remote access to the output data as json take a look at pyDash : https://github.com/k3oni/pydash .

Posted about it a while ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7224710 .

primo442• 12 years ago

Regarding "What operating systems are supported?" and the answer of "scout_realtime relies heavily on the proc file system to fetch metrics. procfs is supported on most Linux-based distributions with the exception of OSX and Debian."

procfs is available on my Debian 7 servers, so scout_realtime just installed and runs fine on the few that I've tried it on.

wazoox2• 12 years ago

And OS X is hardly a "linux distribution" :)

primo442• 12 years ago

And I should add that this thing is awesome! It wouldn't install for me unless I was root, but that might be a ruby configuration thing, since this is also the first ruby app that I've ever touched. It would be nice to have an option to have scout_realtime only listen on 127.0.0.1, so (as someone else already mentioned) we could just proxy to it with another web server and then wrap controls around that.

With my 10 minutes of poking around in the scout_realtime source and a bit of googling, I think the option would go here, in main.rb:

   server = WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(:Port => 5555, :AccessLog => [])

telot• 12 years ago

Noob to Ruby here...any thoughts on why gem_original_require is screwing me up? Thanks for the cool looking tool!

/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `gem_original_require': no such file to load -- json (LoadError) from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require' from /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/scout_realtime-1.0.1/lib/scout_realtime.rb:23 from /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/scout_realtime-1.0.1/bin/scout_realtime:4:in `load' from /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/scout_realtime-1.0.1/bin/scout_realtime:4 from /usr/local/bin/scout_realtime:19:in `load' from /usr/local/bin/scout_realtime:19

_kushagra• 12 years ago

$ gem install json

$ scout_realtime

You're welcome.

executive• 12 years ago

how to view multiple servers on one screen?

Show HN: Real-time server monitoring in your browser

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