STACER
Enhance your Linux system management
Nick Peers takes a deep dive into a tool that aims to be a one-stop shop for all your system maintenance and monitoring needs.
OUR EXPERT
Nick Peers loves tweaking his system, then having to undo said tweaks to get his system working again.
S ystem monitoring tools are priceless. They provide an at-a-glance view of your PC’s health and performance, usually in the form of graphs and lists, spanning such areas as CPU, memory network and hard disk usage on the hardware side, and running processes and services on the software side.
Ubuntu offers its own tool in the form of System Monitor, which you can open via the Launcher’s search tool. This provides three simple views: Processes, Resources and File Systems. The most graphical of these is Resources, with a mixture of line graphs and pie charts revealing CPU, memory (including swap), and network activity. The File Systems tab provides an at-aglance view of all your mounted drives along with their capacity, file system type and available free space.
MONITOR YOUR SYSTEM WITH STACER
1 Main menu
Switch between Stacer’s tools using the collection of graphical buttons on the left of the program window.
2 Main dashboard
Receive updated stats on CPU, memory and system disk performance via these speedometer-like icons.
3 Resource history
Click the graph icon to switch to the Resources view, which provides historical data of system resource usage.
4 System Info
This area of the interface gives you a summary of key parts of your system – including the current kernel release.
5 Network performance
View current upload/download rates, together with how much data has been transferred in the current session.
6 Menu bar icon
Click here to quickly jump to different parts of Stacer, using section titles to guide you rather than icons.
The Processes tab is the most powerful of the three. Not only can you monitor all running processes, but you can also access details about each, plus view processes in relation to each other using a hierarchical tree, which helps to trace child processes to their parents.
In addition, you’re able to control processes from here too: right-click a process to reveal options to stop, continue, end or even kill it. It’s also possible to change a process’s priority. By default, most processes are given equal priority, but if one starts slowing your system down you can try and rein it in without killing it by rightclicking it in System Monitor, then choosing either Low or Very Low from the Change Priority sub-menu.
System Monitor on steroids
System Monitor is a useful tool, but it does lack a few key features. There’s no handy overview of your system as provided by the About section in Settings, for example, and there’s no way to monitor or manage services. If you’re in the market for a more powerful alternative, the good news is that it exists in the form of Stacer (https:// oguzhaninan.github.io/Stacer-Web).