SysGauge is a free system and performance monitor for all recent versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system that offers an impressive set of features.
The program is developed by Flexsense, a company known for high quality products such as the free hard drive management tool DiskBoss, the file change monitor DiskPulse, or the duplicate file finder DupScout.
SysGauge is available as a free download for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. It runs on all client versions of Windows from Windows XP onward, and on all server versions of Windows from Windows Server 2003 onward.
SysGauge
The interface of SysGauge looks clean and nice on start. It displays information on the current and historic cpu usage on start, and information about memory and disk space usage, disk activity and transfer rate, and network transfer rate at the bottom of the screen-
You can change the cpu usage information at the top with a click on one of the metrics listed in the table at the bottom of the screen.
You may also add new counters with a click on the add button. There are plenty of counters that you can add to SysGauge.
While you can select a core metric, e.g. disk activity or memory usage, you may also select finer metrics such as the disk write activity on the main hard drive, the cpu usage of a particular user, or information on the memory cache.
Apart from hardware counters, there are also options to display operating system, process, or file system information.
If you select operating system for instance, you may select to displays the total number of processes, terminal sessions, or access denied errors.
For processes, you may monitor the cpu or memory usage of a selected process among other things.
A click on local computer lets you pick a remote machine that you want to monitor using SysGauge.
Reports can be exported at any time to various file formats including HTML, PDF, Excel spreadsheets, plain text documents, XML files, and CSV files.
One interesting feature of SysGauge is the ability to save reports in intervals automatically. You find the option under SysGauge options > Advanced. You can configure the program to save data to an Excel spreadsheet every 10 minutes for instance, and/or to send the report to an email address in one of the supported formats.
The program may alert you if certain metrics cross a threshold. This is done either by sound, warning messages displayed on the screen, or by email.
You need to edit the counters to add thresholds that you want to monitor.Right-click on any counter that you want to monitor a threshold for, and click on the add button on the next page.
From there, it is just the matter of defining the threshold, and the type of notification. One easy example: You can set a 20% cpu usage threshold, and have SysGauge inform you about it by playing a custom sound. Other custom actions that you may add apart from receiving notifications is to restart or shut down the computer system.
You need to add an email server and authentication information to the program before the email options become available though.
This works equally well when you use the program to monitor a remote computer.
Tip: You may change the interval in which historic information are kept in the settings as well. The maximum is 90 days, the minimum 24 hours (default).
System Status Analysis
Another interesting feature of SysGauge is the ability to create a system status analysis report.
Simply hit the button and wait for the program to scan the local computer. The application checks cpu, memory, and disk space usage, and operating system metrics such as number of processes and errors.
All counters are displayed with their values and a rating which ranges from excellent to warnings and errors.
The report hints at areas that you may need to investigate further, but does not provide tools or additional information for that.
While it may be easy enough to understand a low memory warning and do something about it, things may not be as easy when it comes to the total number of threads, or system errors.
Closing Words
SysGauge is a well designed feature rich system and performance monitor for Windows. It is relatively easy to use, yet powerful enough to please administrators and power users alike.
One thing that I would like to see is the ability to display information on more than metric as a graph or in real-time in the program’s main interface.
The program’s memory usage is quite low (less than 10 Megabyte while running on a 64-bit version of Windows using the 64-bit version of the application).
Now You: do you use system monitoring software?
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