vital

Your machine's load at a glance.

A small terminal monitor that answers one question: is the machine under load? CPU, GPU, memory and disk on one screen, with no process list.

Install See the code on GitLab

Terminal on GNOME with the output of the vit command: CPU, GPU, memory and disk usage, one line each.

Watch it live

With -m the summary refreshes by itself, and you leave with Ctrl-C or Ctrl-D. You can watch the load climb while a build runs, and --interval sets the time between readings.

Terminal with vit -m refreshing CPU, GPU, memory and disk usage while a heavy task runs.

The same reading as JSON

With --json you get one object per reading, one line at a time, in a stable format: fields are only added, never renamed or removed.

Formatted output of the vit --json command, with the CPU, memory and GPU fields.

An alert in one line of shell

Since the output is one line of JSON per reading, jq pulls out what your script needs: warn when memory passes a limit, log the load every minute.

Terminal with vit -m --json piped into jq, which prints the time, CPU usage and memory usage for each reading.

More features

CPU

Average usage over an adjustable sampling window, core and thread counts and the 1, 5 and 15 minute load averages.

GPU

Usage and memory for AMD GPUs on Linux and Apple GPUs on macOS; on other hardware the field shows as n/a.

About the project

vital is for people who want to glance at the terminal and know whether the machine is overloaded. It shows only the CPU, GPU, memory and disk numbers, and the executable is called vit.

There is no process list and no drill-down. GPU reporting is best-effort, one backend per vendor and platform, and never makes the command fail.

Technologies

Rust, with clap for the command line, sysinfo to read the system and serde_json for JSON output.

License: GPL-3.0-only

Install vital

To build, you need Rust and cargo.

From a release

A static Linux binary, also for ARM64 (swap amd64 for arm64). The executable is called vit.

curl -LO https://gitlab.com/alteronauta/vital/-/releases/v1.1.2/downloads/vit-v1.1.2-linux-amd64.tar.gz
curl -LO https://gitlab.com/alteronauta/vital/-/releases/v1.1.2/downloads/SHA256SUMS
sha256sum --check --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS
tar xzf vit-v1.1.2-linux-amd64.tar.gz
install -D vit-v1.1.2-linux-amd64/vit ~/.local/bin/vit

From source

git clone https://gitlab.com/alteronauta/vital.git && cd vital
cargo install --locked --path .

Tell us what you need to solve.

adriano@ars.tec.br

@adriano@ars.tec.br