Single-host system diagnostics in your terminal. The terminal you open when something feels off — before you reach for htop, iostat, nettop, powermetrics, and a notebook full of one-liners.
Sibling to NetWatch. Same chrome. Same palette. Twelve tabs covering everything that runs on one box.
| # | Tab | Replaces |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Overview | dashboard view of all subsystems |
| 2 | CPU | htop CPU panel, top -d, mpstat |
| 3 | Memory | free, vm_stat, htop mem panel |
| 4 | Disks | iostat, iotop (aggregate) |
| 5 | Filesystems | df -h, df -i, mount |
| 6 | Procs | htop, ps auxf, pstree |
| 7 | GPU | ioreg AGXAccelerator PerformanceStatistics / /sys/class/drm |
| 8 | Power | pmset, ioreg AppleSmartBattery / /sys/class/power_supply |
| 9 | Services | launchctl list / systemctl list-units |
| 0 | Net | nettop, iftop |
| - | Timeline | (no equivalent — session log + scrubber) |
| + | Insights | (no equivalent — plain-English anomaly cards) |
Where htop shows you what's running, SysWatch shows you what's happening — across CPU, memory, IO, GPU, power, services — and tells you why in plain English when something's anomalous.
git clone https://github.com/matthart1983/syswatch.git && cd syswatch
cargo build --release
./target/release/syswatchPrerequisites: Rust 1.75+. No system dependencies on Linux. macOS links against the system frameworks.
Crates.io / Homebrew / pre-built binaries land with v0.1 release.
syswatch # default 1Hz tick
syswatch --tick 500 # 2Hz
syswatch --tab procs # boot straight into a tab1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 → Overview / CPU / Mem / Disks / FS / Procs / GPU / Power / Services
0 - + → Net / Timeline / Insights
Tab / Shift-Tab → Cycle tabs
↑ / ↓ → Select row (Procs, Services)
s → Cycle sort (Procs, Services)
← / → → Scrub session backward / forward
Home / End → Oldest sample / live
p → Pause
q / Ctrl-C → Quit
Insights tab. Heuristic anomaly detection over the rolling session — swap thrash, runaway processes, disk full, memory pressure, high load, zombie parties — surfaced as plain-English cards with a suggested tab. The Overview's bottom strip and the tab bar's [+] badge keep them in sight from anywhere.
Session-wide scrubbing. The Timeline tab's ←/→ rewinds the entire app — every panel transparently shows historical state. The session ring is the foundation Snapshot/Diff and Recording will sit on (v0.2).
Honest about platform limits. Where data needs sudo (powermetrics for fans, per-component power, GPU util on Apple Silicon) the tab shows what we can get for free and a one-line note about what's gated. Nothing is faked, nothing prompts.
- Not multi-host. For fleet view, use NetWatch's web dashboard.
- Not a daemon. No long-running collector, no Prometheus push. The session is the database.
- Not interactive remediation. Read-only, deliberately. We don't kill, renice, unmount, or restart.
- Not a logging product. We surface OOM kills as a signal in Memory; we are not a log search UI.
- Not pretty charts for screenshots. Block sparklines, real numbers, no smooth curves, no themes-of-the-week.
All twelve tabs render real data on macOS and Linux. Cross-platform collection via sysinfo. Net interface counters and aggregate disk IO route through netwatch-sdk so SysWatch and the NetWatch agent share a single source of truth for those parsers.
Deferred to v0.2 — Snapshot+Diff (footer S/D), Profiles (P), Recording/Replay (R), Settings (,), Help (?), filter (/).
Deferred behind sudo — fans, per-component power, GPU temperature + per-rail power (all need powermetrics); macOS thermal zone temps (need IOReport private FFI). GPU utilization and used memory on Apple Silicon are no-sudo via ioreg's AGXAccelerator PerformanceStatistics. Linux gets thermal zones for free via sysfs.
Deferred behind features — NVIDIA live GPU stats (gpu-nvidia cargo feature, nvml-wrapper), SMART disk health (smart cargo feature, smartctl --json).
src/
├── main.rs CLI + entry
├── app.rs Event loop, tab state, scrub plumbing
├── collect/ One Collector per subsystem; Snapshot the wire format
│ ├── collector.rs sysinfo-backed CPU/Mem/Procs + dispatch
│ ├── gpu.rs system_profiler / sysfs DRM
│ ├── power.rs ioreg / pmset / sysfs power_supply
│ ├── services.rs launchctl / systemctl
│ └── ring.rs Bounded history + nth_back for scrubbing
├── insights/ Pure functions over (History, &Snapshot)
├── tabs/ One file per tab; thin renderers over the model
└── ui/
├── chrome.rs Header, tab bar, footer
├── palette.rs Single source of color truth
└── widgets.rs block_bar, sparkline, panel
Refresh model: 1 Hz fast loop for CPU/Mem/Procs/Net/IO; slow loops at 5 s for Power/Services (subprocess-heavy on macOS). The UI redraws on tick or keypress; CPU budget target is < 0.5% at idle.
MIT.