rtinfo

rtinfo is a lightweight collection of tools to centralize realtime system monitoring, using low bandwidth small footprint and small amount of dependencies

Contents

• rtinfo-client: remote udp client (using librtinfo to collects data)
• rtinfod: daemon receiving status from rtinfo-client and provide a json output over http
• rtinfo-ncurses: a ncurse based interface to shows json contents from rtinfod
• rtinfo-webui: some demo html files used to display the json.

For a better html version, please check maxux/rtinfo-dashboard

Demonstration

Please take a look at this gallery to show rtinfo displays: http://imgur.com/a/K544C

Dependencies

• rtinfo-client: depends on librtinfo (optional runtime dependency: hddtemp)
• rtinfod: depends on librtinfo and jansson
• rtinfo-ncurses: depends on librtinfo (compile-time), jansson and libncurses

Note:

• librtinfo can be found here: maxux/librtinfo

How to use it

You need to compile each wanted sub-directory. Just type 'make' on them.

• Start a daemon: ./rtinfod/rtinfod
• Connect a client: ./rtinfo-client/rtinfo-client --disk sd --host 127.0.0.1
• Connect it a remote: ./rtinfo-ncurses/rtinfo-ncurses --host 127.0.0.1

Warning: there is no encryption for the udp packets. If you are on a dangerous/untrusted network, please consider using rtinfo over securized tunnel or trusted network.

rtinfod sends data in json format, grab it with HTTP GET request to /json on the rtinfod remote socket.

Note: there is no real web server behind rtinfod, don't try to do anything else than GET /json

Performance and resources impact

Network usage

On my laptop (2 ssd, 7 network interfaces), a full client output (summary, network and disk usage) is about 689 bytes (128 bytes for system information, 132 bytes for disks and 429 bytes for network usage).

Keep in mind that on theses 689 bytes, you have: per disk read/write bytes and rates, per interface mac address, ip address, bytes tranfered and current rate, etc.

Except if you have a lot of (+20 disks or +15 network interfaces) components, all UDP packet should be sent in a single Ethernet frame. The payload size may be improved later by compression, probably.

About 700 bytes per seconds makes an average of ~57 MiB of data per day. For this project usecase, this is is really peanuts.

System resources impact

After running rtinfo-client for 7 days on my laptop, it used 13 minutes 40 seconds of cpu times, which makes an average cpu utilization of 0.13% and 0.70 MiB of RAM usage... for a realtime information system (1 second delay only).

Tested Hardware

rtinfo-client was fully running on:

• Dell Inspiron and XPS Laptop
• Generic x86_64 motherboard
• SuperMicro motherboard
• Raspberry Pi (Zero, B+, 2B, 3B), ARM
• Linksys WRT54G, MIPS
• Packet.net nodes x86_64 and ARM
• OVH and Kimsufi servers
• BBox2 (Belgian ISP MIPS routerboard)
• Orange Pi
• Mellanox Motherboard with Quanta Enclosure

It should works out-of-box on any Linux system, without root privilege (at least on vanilla kernel, with grsec for exemple, you need root privilege for some information)

Bugs

Feel free to send any pull requests to improve this project

Contributors

Thanks to: @nado, @bendardenne, @wget, @zaibon