When using command line, I of course have my trusted tool belt with plenty of legendary shell commands that have been around for decades. But just to keep myself fresh and not become a grumpy Unix greybeard, every now and then I explore what's out there today. Here are some tips that may or may not help you with Zabbix as well.
Ghostty: A bit different terminal
Ghostty is the latest rave when it comes to command line terminals available for Linux and Mac. On surface, one could imagine it's very bare bones. The looks can be very deceiving:
- It looks like a native app on both Linux and Mac
- it's written on Zig and is fast
- it's extremely configurable via a text-based config file
- supports custom shaders that allow animated backgrounds and special effects
- has additional tools and plugins, and can be refreshingly simple yet powerful experience
Maybe make it switch to different configuration file every time your Zabbix gets a new critical alert, so you see a dangerous new animated background if something is really wrong?
And, as it uses GPU acceleration, why not to use your Zabbix 7.2+ to monitor it in case you have an Nvidia GPU?
asitop: Monitor Apple Silicon Mac CPU/GPU/ANE
Speaking of GPU monitoring, asitop provides just that and more for your Apple Silicon Mac. It shows you the CPU/GPU/ANE (Apple Neural Engine) usage in a fancy way.
powermetrics: Apple Silicon monitoring in more Zabbix-friendly format
asitop, while cool, isn't suitable for us monitoring geeks who want to integrate everything with Zabbix.
For more Zabbix-compatible output, powermetrics can be great as it can provide you the process info, CPU/GPU/ANE statistics and so forth in human-readable format, and also in plist format.
Here's a short snippet from total of 10241(!) lines long plist format output of powermetrics -n1 -f plist
<key>cpu_energy</key>
<integer>1923</integer>
<key>cpu_power</key>
<real>383.434</real>
<key>gpu_energy</key>
<integer>5807</integer>
<key>gpu_power</key>
<real>1157.88</real>
<key>ane_energy</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>ane_power</key>
<real>0</real>
<key>combined_power</key>
<real>1541.31</real>
... and here's a short snippet from the human-readable format (it shows MUCH more):
CPU Power: 336 mW
GPU Power: 197 mW
ANE Power: 0 mW
Combined Power (CPU + GPU + ANE): 533 mW
**** GPU usage ****
GPU HW active frequency: 1257 MHz
GPU HW active residency: 23.28% (444 MHz: 3.4% 612 MHz: 0% 808 MHz: 0% 968 MHz: 0% 1110 MHz: 0% 1236 MHz: 0% 1338 MHz: 0% 1398 MHz: 20%)
GPU SW requested state: (P1 : 0% P2 : 0% P3 : 0% P4 : 0% P5 : 0% P6 : 0% P7 : 0% P8 : 100%)
GPU SW state: (SW_P1 : 0% SW_P2 : 0% SW_P3 : 0% SW_P4 : 0% SW_P5 : 0% SW_P6 : 0% SW_P7 : 0% SW_P8 : 0%)
GPU idle residency: 76.72%
GPU Power: 197 mW
So, hopefully next time I'll come back with a new template to monitor the Apple Silicon hardware.
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