Glances
Cross-platform system monitoring tool with TUI, Web UI, and APIs
33.2k stars 1.8k forks last commit first released
Actively maintained
Last commit 25 Jul 2026.
Glances is an open-source, cross-platform system monitoring tool designed as an alternative to tools like top/htop. It provides real-time insights into system resources and processes, and supports local or remote monitoring via terminal, web interface, and APIs.
Key Features
- Terminal-based dashboard showing CPU, memory, load, processes, disk I/O, network, filesystem, uptime, and system info
- Built-in web UI for monitoring from a browser on any device
- Client/server modes for remote monitoring, including discovery of available Glances servers
- RESTful JSON API and XML-RPC server for integrations and automation
- Pluggable architecture with plugins for sensors and hardware metrics (e.g., temperatures and fan speeds)
- Container monitoring support (notably Docker and Podman)
- Export metrics to external systems or files, including CSV and JSON outputs
Use Cases
- Monitoring a single server or workstation interactively from the terminal
- Remote monitoring of multiple machines via web UI or API integrations
- Exporting system metrics to external databases or monitoring pipelines
Limitations and Considerations
- Some functionality (web UI, specific plugins, exports) requires optional dependencies beyond the minimal installation
Glances fits well when you want a lightweight, interactive overview of system health while also enabling programmatic access and metric exports for broader observability workflows. Its cross-platform support makes it practical for mixed OS environments.
Categories:
Tags:
Tech Stack:
Similar to Glances
Prometheus
Monitoring system and time-series database for metrics and alerting
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and time-series database for collecting metrics, querying with PromQL, and alerting on system and application health.
InfluxDB
Time-series database for metrics, events, and real-time analytics
InfluxDB is an open source time-series database for high-ingest metrics and event data, enabling fast queries for monitoring, dashboards, and real-time analytics.
cAdvisor
Container resource usage and performance monitoring daemon
cAdvisor (Container Advisor) collects, processes, and exports resource usage and performance metrics for running containers, with a built-in web UI and REST API.
Netdata
Real-time, per‑second full‑stack monitoring and observability
Open-source, agent-based monitoring platform delivering per-second metrics, edge ML anomaly detection, tiered time-series storage and centralized cloud UI.
Grafana
Observability dashboards and alerting for metrics, logs, and traces
Grafana is an open source observability and data visualization platform for querying, graphing, and alerting on metrics, logs, and traces across many data sources.
Zabbix
Enterprise-class monitoring and observability platform
Zabbix is an open-source monitoring and observability platform for networks, servers, VMs, applications, and cloud infrastructure, with alerting and dashboards.