Best System Monitor for Mac OS X
Mac OS X already ships with a robust system monitor, but just taking a look at the general health of your system isn’t all that good. For that, we like Monity, which sits in your Notification Center for quick access to a wealth of information.
Moniti
Platform : Mac OS X Price : $ 2.99 Download Page
Functions
- General system monitoring in the Notification Center
- Tracks system statistics, memory, battery and disk usage
- Data is easily accessible from anywhere in OS X
- Easily rearrange panels and customize the look
- Detailed use of space for each disk
- Battery Information for Bluetooth Devices
- Detailed breakdown of memory usage
Where is it best
The real appeal of Monity is that it manages to get into the Goldilocks zone of system monitors. It’s lightweight and cheap, offers a solid amount of monitoring data, and doesn’t overwhelm you with options. The fact that it’s in your Notification Center (as opposed to the menu bar, like many other options) means it won’t get in your way unless you really need it. This also means that you can easily open it with a keyboard shortcut. In fact, Monity’s main appeal is that it packs a lot of information into a small space without being overly intrusive. If you’re really just looking for a simple system monitor that doesn’t get in the way, Monity is a great fit.
Where it fails
Monity doesn’t have a ton of options, and if you’re more interested in charts than statistics, you’re out of luck with Monity. The only way to display the data is with numbers, so while the design is certainly acceptable, there is nothing special about it. Likewise, you cannot tweak the data you see at a very granular level, so if you are only interested in monitoring specific processes, Monity is not for you. Likewise, temperature data are lacking. Monity only works in the Notification Center, so if that’s not what you’re interested in, you should take a look at the other options.
Competition
The Activity Monitor utility that ships with Mac OS X is a fairly reliable system statistics monitor. You can see the activity / usage of CPU, memory, network and disk and also break everything down by task. You can (force) complete tasks as needed, research what they are doing, and organize them the way you want. For the most part, Activity Monitor will be sufficient for most users, so it will do its job well if you don’t need to constantly monitor your system’s activity.
If you’re looking for a really powerful, customizable and customizable performance monitor, the iStat Menus 5 ($ 16) is exactly what you need. It’s on the menu bar, has tons of drop-down menus, keeps track of whatever you might think of, and even has app-specific statistics. It’s extremely powerful, but not really needed by the average user. If that’s too much for you, the iStat Mini ($ 2.99) works similarly to Monity while in your Notification Center, but doesn’t have the same amount of data.
MenuMeters was our previous pick and is still a solid system monitor if you don’t mind it taking up a lot of space on your menu bar. It can do everything Monity can and more, with custom display options and many different counters. It’s a little ugly, but it’s also free and open source.