System Guard for all Monitoring needs

The Windows 98 system monitor was light years ahead of the task manager of the subsequent Windows editions. The System monitor allowed differet sensors to be selected and included which made it an ideal tool to keep an eye on the system's status.

I am pleased to say that the System Guard applet in PC Linux is a similarly gifted tool. While I was initially put off by the fact that the only sensors available by default are the CPU and RAM readings, a closer look revealed that other sensors could be added, and there were more customisation options.

The fastest way to access system guard is to add it as an applet to the taskbar. This will create a small indicator which only shows CPU and RAM readings, but a couple of clicks is all that is needed to launch the actual application. System guard can also be acessed from the System - Monitoring - KSysGuard menu.

Here the right sidebar shows the list of all available sensors. The existing sensors can be removed with a right click to make space for a new sensor. If needed a new Worksheet containing more sensors can be added. The number of sensors and their layout can also be modified. Other customisation options include colour, grid, scale settings etc. Since I was seeking a tool to track the network usage, the result of my work is displayed below. The biggest drawback is that the taskbar icons cannot be modified to reflect the sensors being tacketed. They can only show the CPU and RAM status, and importantly, as happened in my case, removing the graphics from the taskbar is a permanent step. Once deleted they cannot be replaced or recovered. This also makes it difficult to access the system guard from the task bar. So it is best to leave atleast one graph running in the taskbar icon.