If you have a *nix workstation you have probably either seen or used GKrellM. It’s a handy dandy program to give you up to the second stats on most of the important data on your system. Disk space/activity, network traffic, CPU and memory usage, processes, the works.
If you are looking to run it on remote headless machines, ssh is your friend and makes life easier. Install GKrellM on the remote box. In a local terminal, do the following:
ssh -N -f -L 19150:127.0.0.1:19150 user@host.com
Obviously, change the “user@host.com” to your user and host. You can also change the 19150 to pretty much anything, just make sure you match that in the gkrellmd.conf file. Once the gkrellmd daemon is started, you can then connect to it by running:
/usr/bin/gkrellm -s 127.0.0.1 -P 19150
Again, changing the 19150 port to match whatever you used in the above set. Configs are stored locally and can be manually edited, or you can use the standard GUI setup. You can then run the above with different ports for different hosts.
Happy monitoring!