System Monitor: Tom’s Mac software pick

 

Do you enjoy Touching your Mac , trying to get the most out of its hardware ? Or maybe you have some rare issues that may be related to the internal temperature of your Mac or other stressors on your Mac.

There are several system monitor applications available for the Mac, such as being provided with the monitor for free. But for those power users looking for monitoring tools, Marcel Bresink’s system monitors are hard to lose.

Pro

• The system monitor appears as a menu bar, keeping it always available and out of the way.
• Customizable display
• Seven key components were observed, each with a huge array of observations.

Against

• Display ascending menu bar
• Mostly a black and white display; Limited use of colors for organizations
• There are no alerts or warning powers.

System Monitor is an application that monitors key components of your Mac and displays their activity near the Mac’s menu bar. There are seven components that are monitored:

• Processor
• Main sensor (CPU temperature and fan speed)
• Memories
• Pieces
• Disk
• Network interface
• Activities

Monitoring that provides different observations of each item, monitoring how to determine parameters, monitoring of items can be done easily when configuring each item from disabled, to fully understand the configuration options, you need to make a trip to the help file and include Manual.

Using the system monitor

System Monitor installs as an app located in your Applications folder. It can actually be saved anywhere you want, but the / apps folder is as good as any one spot and ensures that it will be detected and updated through the Mac App Store .

The most visual part of the application is the long sequence of icons and the data added to your Mac’s menubar, the actual interface for setting up the application is its preference, allowing you to configure each of the seven monitoring areas.

General and menu bar layout preferences

The choices are divided into seven monitored items, as well as choices for general settings that apply across the board and a setting to control the menu bar layout .

In the menu bar layout, you can control the size of the history bar and the graphs shown, as well as the order in which the monitored items are displayed.

Allows you to specify the temperature scale to use in general settings, how the size of the memory is displayed and if the public IP (WAN part of your network) is encountered. For some reason the app has a slight hiccup at this point, if you prefer to display the WAN address in the network interface, the app assumes you are using a dynamic DNS service and needs to provide information about the service you are using and how much the WAN address will be updated.

I ‘m not sure why you display a WAN-side address automatically because you ‘re using a dynamic DNS service , but the guess is wrong, and I hope in future updates, dynamic DNS settings will only be intentionally de-coupled to display your WAN address

Data source settings

Each of the seven monitoring items has their own choice settings, allowing you to customize how each item is collected and displayed. In most cases, you choose to use different chart types, actual values ​​or percentages as appropriate for each item.

Some of the more interesting settings are for the disk, which can also be important and important for monitoring the performance of your disk. To predict possible failure modes that may be ready to happen.

For another interesting setting activities, which come back to the days when most Macs use external drives, everyone has their own access light that makes a reading or writing happen. If you miss the day of flashing computer lights, you can use the Activity Monitor to access any disk or network interface, and display the results as an activity light in the menu bar. Be prepared for a lot of dim lights.

Monitoring is easy enough to configure the rest of the items, but if you have any questions about them, System Monitor has a pretty good help system that includes a write-up on how to configure each item, nicely explain what each option is and how to use it.

System Monitor menu bar

Once everything is configured, you can go about your daily work and look at the menu bar to see how the Mac bar is performing on your Mac. Of course, the actual use for system monitors comes when you encounter a problem with your Mac, such as a beach ball / pinwheel cursor, slow networking , or another bit of computer malware. With the system monitor enabled, just a quick glance can help you understand what is happening, and, hopefully, help you solve the problem.

The latest thought

Overall, I like System Monitor. I had a great idea that I think putting system monitors in the menu bar. The problem with many hardware monitoring apps is that they take up quite a bit of screen real estate, you can make them less effective for moving windows when working with their Mac, as you just watch Monitor app system monitor lets you go back to work and easily Ignore monitoring, when something suspicious happens, and then the information is OK in the menu bar.

Negatives, however, can be very involved in turning on all system monitor options in the menu bar. To get the most out of the app, you need to be careful, and just activate the function you think you need; That will help keep the cluster down

My final negative comment is the lack of color. Yes, some of the system monitor components have color bits in them, but overall, the display is awesome in black and white. It’s actually a bit depressing. A touch of color would be strange, and help with the visual organization between the various items that may be monitored. When all is black and white, they go together, making it harder than picking a particular item.

Needless to say, the system monitor does exactly what you want it to do, and it needs to get your work done using the menu bar and without taking on screen real estate. If you want to keep track of your Mac’s performance or have a problem that can be helped by monitoring various hardware items, you should check out System Monitor.

The System Monitor is 4.99 and is available from the Mac App Store. A demo is also available from the developer’s website.