

Psdash: A linux system information web dashboard using Psutils and Flask - r4um
https://github.com/Jahaja/psdash

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shirro
Not picking on this tool specifically but I see these sorts of things posted
on HN a bit and I am struggling to understand the appeal. So genuine quesion:
I can understand it is a fun task to build but what advantages does it bring
in real world use? Is it just a novelty thing or do people use these sorts of
tools and if so why and what advantages do they have over ssh/cli?

My sysadmin brain is always looking to reduce the dependencies and the attack
surface. Ideally I want less services running on less ports. Less software to
install, maintain and secure. As a result I stick to ssh and shell most of the
time. Generally any admin tool that has big library dependencies (eg anything
python, node.js or ruby) is on my shit list. I am a bit more sympathetic to Go
because of the single static exe but otherwise I prefer plain old shell.

I understand historical graphs are nice to look at and time series data is one
of the areas where web tools are a win. Though I am probably more likely to
look at alerts based on triggers than watch a graph in real time. I don't
understand what advantage tables of process stats in html offers over the same
in the cli.

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jahaja
I pretty much agree with you. The reason I built the tool was to give a system
overview for the vagrant box we use at my work. Especially one that could tail
and search logs (the one in supervisor is pretty useless).

And in the end; all devs aren't devops so it's easier to have it web-based.

Who knows, with time, maybe this tool can be extended to be useful for your
purposes as well.

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shirro
Thanks. That makes sense as a tool for developers who don't have sophisticated
unix skills. I guess quite a lot of people are targeting Linux as a production
environment but come from quite different backgrounds and using different
platforms for development. Once you mention vagrant it all falls into place.
Nice one.

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nathancahill
Use with caution. I was able to print my /etc/passwd file using /log/read.

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SEJeff
FYI: /etc/passwd is world readable. You get get the same info with the
command:

getent passwd

Reading /etc/shadow is a real problem, /etc/passwd is really not a huge issue.

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napsterbr
Seems interesting, but I need to see some charts. I think I will use psdash +
loadavg ([http://loadavg.com/](http://loadavg.com/)). Until now I was using
New Relic server monitoring.

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ams6110
How much load do tools like this add to the system. Ideally you want
monitoring tools to be like using a voltmeter on an electronic circuit...
display what's happening but adding very little influence of its own.

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d0ugie
Virtually none in this case, though letting the processes page run on my
system eats up 2% of the CPU (a long, updating list), versus 0% on everything
else. Uses Flask.

Do these things have a harder time pulling such figures off of VPSs?

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ErikBjare
Sadly, the figure was not so conservative on my Raspberry Pi (closer to 25%).

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jahaja
That's not very good. On all pages or just the process-list page?

I could add an option that disables the auto-updating. The only thing that's
currently polled by a background thread is some network information from
/proc/net/dev.

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ErikBjare
Well I incidentally only checked while on the process page (and promptly
removed it), but nice work none the less.

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saltyknuckles
This is awesome

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rmchugh
looks interesting, will give it a try.

