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If you are shopping for a powerful and multi-featured system monitor for Mac, needless to say, you’ll appreciate the functionality offered by iStat Menus.This is a quality software product, which can help you keep tabs on the general performance of your computer.

Mac OS X already comes with a solid system monitor, but it’s not that great to just glance at your overall system health. For that, we like Monity, which sits in your Notification Center for easy access to a wealth of information.

Here's a List of the Best System Monitoring Tools and Software: Windows users deal with a large variety of options when it comes to systems monitoring tools. The following list details 7 tools and software on the market that will help you keep a close eye on your infrastructure if your primarily a Windows Server (2012, 2008, 2003, etc). Mac OS X already comes with a solid system monitor, but it’s not that great to just glance at your overall system health. For that, we like Monity, which sits in your Notification Center for.

Monity

Platform: Mac OS X
Price: $2.99
Download Page

Features

General system monitoring in the Notification Center
Monitors systems stats, memory, battery, and disk usage
Data is easily accessible from anywhere in OS X
Easy to rearrange panels and customize the appearance
Detailed space usage for each disk
Battery information for Bluetooth devices
Detailed breakdown of memory usage

Where It Excels

Monity’s real appeal is the fact it manages to hit the Goldilocks zone of system monitors. It’s lightweight and cheap, offers a solid amount of monitoring data, and doesn’t overwhelm you with options. The fact it’s in your Notification Center (as opposed to the menubar, like many other options), means it’s out of your way unless you really need it. It also means you can easily pull it up with a keyboard shortcut. Really, Monity’s main appeal is the fact it packs a lot of information into a small space without being too intrusive. If you’re really just looking for a simple system monitor that stays out of the way, Monity works perfectly.

Where It Falls Short

Monity doesn’t have a ton of options and if you’re more interested in graphs instead of stats, you’re out of luck with Monity. The only way it displays data is with numbers, so while the design is certainly acceptable, it’s nothing to write home about it. Similarly, you can’t customize the data you see on a very granular level, so if you’re only interested in monitoring specific processes, Monity will fall short for you. Likewise, it’s missing temperature data. Monity only works in the Notification Center, so if that’s not something you’re interested in, then you’ll want to take a look at other options.

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The Competition

Best Monitor For Mac Pro

Activity Monitor, the utility that comes with Mac OS X, is a pretty solid system statistics monitor. You can see CPU, memory, network, and disk activity/usage, plus it breaks down everything by task. You can (force) quit tasks as needed, investigate what they’re doing, and organize them however you want. For the most part, Activity Monitor will be enough for most users so it’ll do the job just fine if you don’t need to constantly monitor your system activity.

If you’re looking for a seriously powerful, customizable, and tweakable system monitor, iStat Menus 5($16) is exactly what you need. It sits in the menubar, has a ton of dropdown menus, monitors everything you can possibly think to monitor, and even has app-specific statistics. It’s extremely powerful, but isn’t really necessary for the average user. If that’s too much for you, iStat Mini($2.99) works similarly to Monity by sitting in your Notification Center, but doesn’t have quite the same amount of data.

MenuMeters was our previous pick here and it’s still a solid system monitor if you don’t mind the fact it takes up a ton of space in your menubar. It can do everything Monity can do and more, with custom display options and a ton of different meters. It’s a bit on the ugly side, but it’s also free and open source.

A lot of Mac users have a “live and let live” philosophy when it comes to their Macs. They know their Mac is more than equipped to take care of performance issues on its own so they mostly leave it alone.

But if you use your Mac for more than just surfing the web or writing, I’m sure you’re interested to know what exactly is going on in there. Precious data about the CPU usage can be incredibly helpful for video editors. App developers would be interested to know just how much RAM and internet speed their app is taking up.

My Mac is almost three years old now with only 4 GB RAM. While it hasn’t given me any major issues, it does get problematic when I have far too many Chrome tabs open or when I launch a heavy app.

If you’re interested in knowing your CPU, memory, disk, and network usage at all times, check out the apps below.

MenuMeters

Radio automation freeware. MenuMeters is a free app and is very reliable. Once installed, you’ll find it in System Preferences instead of as its own app.

Here you’ll find options to enable CPU, disk, memory, and network monitoring widgets that show up in the menu bar. The CPU widget can show up as a graph, percentage, or a thermometer. Just beware that MenuMeters monitors CPU thread as well as cores. If you have a quad-core Mac, just the CPU monitoring can take up half the menu bar.

Hot tip: Some of menu bar’s widgets, including system and MenuMeter widgets are movable. Just hold down the Command key and drag the selected widget.

MenuMeter’s memory widget is my favorite. You can have it display bar or chart graphs but I went with plain text. Knowing the exact amount of free RAM I have at any given point is exhilarating.

You can do the same with network speeds. Either opt for graphs or plain text (I went with the latter). All the elements in MenuMeters are immensely customizable. You can change the update intervals, display width for graphs and even change the colors for displayed elements.

Clicking on any menu bar widget gives you a dropdown with a detailed view of the stats.

MagicPaster

Monitors For Mac Mini

MagicPaster takes a different approach to system monitoring. Yes, the app’s icon sits in the menu bar but that’s just to bring up the settings.

MagicPaster floats sticky note windows with specific system stats over the screen. You can invoke it using a special global hotkey Shift + Cmd + S and the stats will pop right up.

The app shows more stats than MenuMeters and as the app isn’t limited to the menu bar you get pie charts and graphs along with the text. You are free to move the little widgets around or to disable any.

MenuMeters vs MagicPaster

If you want an always present view of your RAM or network use, go with MenuMeters.

If you’re not actively looking to monitor your system but you do want instant access to the system details, download MagicPaster and use the global hotkey to bring up the stats in an instant.

Also See#Lists #monitoring

Did You Know

Best System Monitor For Mac

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