In this tutorial we will show you how to install and configuration of Glances System Monitoring on your CentOS 7 server.  For those of you who didn’t know, Glances is a free software (licensed under LGPL) to monitor your GNU/Linux or BSD operating system from a text interface. Using it you can monitor CPU, Load Average, Memory, Network Interfaces, Disk I/O, File System spaces utilization, mounted devices, total number of active processes and top processes. There are many interesting options available in Glances. One of the main features is that you can set thresholds (careful, warning and critical) in a configuration file, and information will be shown in colors which indicates the bottleneck in the system. Glances uses the library libstatgrab to retrieve information from your system and it is developed in Python.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation Glances System Monitoring on a CentOS 7 server.

Glances Features

Glances will display:

• Memory information including RAM, swap, and free memory.
• The average CPU load of your system.
• CPU information like user related application, system programs and idle programs.
• Total number of active and sleeping processes.
• Download and upload rates of your network connections.
• Disk I/O read and write details.
• Display currently mounted disk devices.
• Shows the current date and time at bottom.

Install Glances System Monitoring on CentOS 7

Step 1. First, you need to enable EPEL repository on your system.

Once EPEL repository installed, you can install Glances by running the following command:

Step 2. Installing Glances.

Now enter the below command to install Glances:

Once installation has finished, you can launch Glances by running the following command:

The output will look something like this:

In glances you’ll see a lot of information about the resources of your system: CPU, Load, Memory, Swap Network, Disk I/O and Processes all in one page, by default the color code means:

• Green: Okay
• Blue: Caution
• Violet: Warning
• Red: Critical

When Glances is running, you can press some special keys to give commands to it:

• m: Sort processes by MEM%
• p: Sort processes by name
• c: Sort processes by CPU%
• d: Show/hide disk I/O stats
• a: Sort Processes automatically
• f: Show/hide file system statshddtemp
• i: Sort processes by I/O rate
• s: Show/hide sensors stats
• y: Show/hide hddtemp stats
• l: Show/hide logs
• n: Show/hide network stats
• x: Delete warning and critical logs
• h: Show/hide help screen
• q: Quit
• w: Delete warning logs

Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed Glances. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Glances System Monitoring on your CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Glances System Monitoring web site.