Help us make monitoring beautiful, realtime, and a joy to use. We're hiring.
30 years ago, top was born. scout_realtime is top for the modern developer.
Note: This project is no longer being maintained or supported.
Installation
Install scout_realtime on your server, then access locally from your dev box.
On your server:
1
$ gem install scout_realtime
2
$ scout_realtime
Then, on your local computer:
3
$ ssh -NL 5555:localhost:5555 user@ip_or_hostname
Where
user@ip_or_hostname is your usual SSH access - this creates an SSH tunnel to your server.
4
Point your browser to http://localhost:5555
Computers have changed a bit since 1984. Shouldn't top change too?
Here’s what we’ve updated:
-
Smooth-scrolling, every-second updating charts.
Trends become clear with the historical context of timeseries charts.
-
See disk and network activity.
While cpu and memory metrics are displayed via
top, no disk or network metrics are shown. We've added disk utilization, disk space, and network traffic. Now all of the key performance metrics are in a single view. -
Clearer memory usage metrics.
top'smemory usedmetric is the cause of frequent confusion. It's usually very close to the total memory which makes it look like you are running of out RAM. However, that's not the case: Linux uses all free RAM for the disk buffer cache to make reading data from the disk as efficient as possible. We've removed the buffer cache from the memory numbers. -
Grouping processes by name.
The
topdisplay can jump around a lot as processes become active. We've grouped processes with the same name together and display the number of processes running. The result? Trends in active processes become much clearer.
Questions
Is scout_realtime free?
Yes - and open-source too! View the source on Github.
scout_realtime is maintained by the team at Scout, a SaaS server monitoring solution trusted by tens of thousands of developers.
Is scout_realtime secure?
The daemon fetches key metrics from you server, stores them in memory, and renders them in your browser - there is no inbound communication and nothing is written to disk. We run it on our own production servers.
What operating systems are supported?
scout_realtime relies heavily on the proc file system to fetch
metrics. procfs is available on Linux-based distributions. OSX and
FreeBSD do not have full support for procfs and are not supported.
What version of Ruby is required?
You need Ruby 1.9.3+ on your server to runscout_realtime.
Does my server need to have a public IP or domain name?
Yes, you need a public IP or domain name to viewscout_realtime in your browser.
Can multiple people view the realtime stats?
Yes. Open a port in your firewall instead of using the SSH tunnel:sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 5555 -j ACCEPT
The SSH tunnel is a pain. Is there a way to set up persistent access?
Yes, just open a port in your firewall using the iptables command above.Can I specify a different port to run it on?
Yes.scout_realtime --help
for options.
Can I specify where the the log and/or PID is written?
Yes.scout_realtime --help
for options.
How much CPU and memory will this consume if I leave it running?
We've clocked the CPU usage of thescout_realtime daemon at 1% on an Intel Xeon 2.40GHz CPU. Memory usage is around 22 MB.
If you turn off the metric collection (by
clicking the pause button on the web page), CPU usage will effectively drop to 0%, and you'll still be able to visit the web page and
re-enable metrics at any time.
Installing the gem didn't work.
You need Ruby 1.9.3+ on your server to runscout_realtime.
Try which ruby
(to confirm you have Ruby), ruby -v
(to show Ruby's version), and
which gem
to confirm you have Ruby gems (Ruby's package manager) available.
Where's the log file?
By default, the a log is written to~/.scout/scout_realtime.log
How do I stop the daemon?
scout_realtime stop
How do I uninstall scout_realtime?
gem uninstall scout_realtime
An open-source tool created by
