#46 in Monitoring & ObservabilityUpdated 2026-08

Glances

by Glances · Cross-platform system monitoring in the terminal or a browser

18.1 — BenchRank score out of 100

Homepage

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Overview

Glances is a cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python. It reports CPU, memory, load, processes, network interfaces, disk I/O, sensors, filesystems and Docker or Podman containers in a curses terminal interface or a built-in web UI. It also exposes an XML-RPC server and a RESTful JSON API, and exports statistics to InfluxDB, Cassandra, StatsD and other backends.

Best for: Sysadmins wanting per-host CPU, memory, disk and container stats from a terminal or browser.
Pricing: The captured page shows no prices; it only describes installation from PyPI with pip.

Strengths and trade-offs

Strengths

Runs on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows
XML-RPC server and RESTful JSON API for other clients
Built-in web UI for monitoring from any device
Exports to InfluxDB, Cassandra, StatsD, ElasticSearch and more

Trade-offs

Installed per machine via pip; no hosted or managed option shown
Minimal pip install omits plugins; needs the glances[all] extra
Support is community-only: mailing list, chat and Twitter

How this score is made up

Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.

MCP support: 0 out of 100
API quality: 0 out of 100
Documentation: 0 out of 100
Agent friendliness: 41 out of 100
Changelog: 100 out of 100
Marketing site structure: 20 out of 100
Operational trust: 0 out of 100

Measured, but not part of the score

Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.

Openness: 30 out of 100
Maintenance: 100 out of 100

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