controlling capabilities. System monitoring software like SpeedFan on Windows, lm_sensors on Linux, envstat on NetBSD, and sysctl hw.sensors on OpenBSD and DragonFly can interface with these chips to relay this environmental sensor information to the user. Privacy When an individual user is measuring the performance of a single-user system, whether it is a standalone box or a virtual machine on a multi-user system, access does not impede the privacy of others. Privacy becomes an issue when someone other than the end-user, such as a system manager, has legitimate need to access data about other users. Resource usage When events occur faster than a monitor can record them, a workaround is needed, such as replacing event recording with simple counting. Another consideration is not having major impact on the CPU and storage available for useful work. While a hardware monitor will usually have less impact than a software monitor, there are data items, such as "some descriptive information, such as program names" that must involve software. A further consideration is that a bug in this domain can have severe impact: an extreme case would be "cause the OS to crash." List of software monitors Single system: Activity Monitor AIDA64 CPU-Z GPU-Z Conky htop hw.sensors on OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD iftop iostat KDE System Guard (KSysguard) lm_sensors monit Monitorix Motherboard Monitor Netdata nmon ntop Process Explorer Resource Monitor (resmon) Samurize Sar in UNIX SpeedFan sysmon/envsys on NetBSD systat System Monitor (sysmon) top Vigilo NMS (Community Edition) vmstat Windows Desktop Gadgets Windows Task Manager Distributed: Argus (monitoring software) Collectd Ganglia GKrellM HP SiteScope monit (paid version M/monit) NMIS Munin Nagios NetCrunch Opmantek Pandora FMS Performance Monitor (perfmon) Prometheus (software) symon Vigilo NMS (Enterprise Editions) Zenoss Core See also Application performance management (APM) Application service management (ASM) I2C and SMBus Network monitoring Mean time between failures (MTBF) Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) System profiler Website monitoring References External links Monitoring a Linux System with X11/Console/Web-Based Tools Computer peripherals Liquid crystal displays System administration Utility software types