Gkrellm

It would be hard to describe the visual image that is conjured up when an unpronounceable name like GKrellm is mentioned. Is it a bird, is it an aeroplane,....

I do not know the mnemonics, but this is the name of a system resource monitoring applet that is hidden in PC Linux - System - Monitoring menu. With such a name, you wouldn't launch it without being prepared for a system wide automated destruction.

I had talked about the System Guard charts which were quite informative and configurable. GKrellm offers something that System Guard does not - space conservation. Anyone who has had the good fortune of learning about and using Netmeter (in Windows) will understand the role a space saving design plays in the overall application usability. System Guard is rich in the number of sensors it can track, but if you are going to keep the window open all the time, it has to be of such a size that it does not obstruct the other windows. Since my main aim was to check if the 2MBps broadband link was being fully utilised, I needed to keep the monitoring window on top always, and still continue to work on other windows.

GKRellm fills this void. Once launched it appears as a vertical banner that has different windows tracking the RAM and CPU and other usual parameters. What raises the bar is the configurability. The size of the window can be modified, as can the number of sensors, the charts the lengths of time being tracked etc are all configurable. This strongly reminded me of Netmeter's awesome skills. It still is way sub par though, but for all practical purposese it is satisfactory.

The screenshot is of a highly modified GKrellm window tracking the eth0 interface placed on top of an Opera window.