Many users want to constantly know what is happening on their system e.g. the CPU load, the memory usage, network traffic etc. In this guide I will show you two applications for Unity that are placed in the top panel and allow you to monitor your system.
The first one is System Load Indicator, a system load monitor capable of displaying graphs for CPU, ram, and swap space use, plus network traffic. To install it open Software Center and search for System Load Indicator. Give your user password and install it. To launch it open dash and search for it with the same name. If you right click on its icon and select Preferences you can choose the displayed resources, whether you want System Load Indicator to start automatically on boot, its width and update interval and moreover its colours. Indicator Multiload is available to install in Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10 and 12.04
The second application is SysPeek. SysPeek is a system monitor indicator that displays CPU usage, memory usage, swap usage, disk usage and network traffic. Unfortunately this one isn't available through Software Center and therefore you have to add a PPA in order to install it. Open a terminal and type:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:vicox/syspeek
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install syspeek
Once it is installed launch it through dash by searching for syspeek. Disk usage refers to your /home partition. SysPeek doesn't have any customization options so it is what you see in the screenshot below.
