People keep asking me what's the best system monitoring application for Apple macOS systems.
So in this video I will show you, how to install, configure and use the best tool for complex
advanced Mac system monitoring you can get, so stay tuned.
Hi, I’m Teresa from morgonaut.cloud and I help people with their Apple Macintosh computers
and Hackintosh builds.
If you are new here, then please click that subscribe button and hit the bell next to
it, so you won’t miss any of my future videos.
Most complex and advanced system monitoring tool for macOS is called iStat Menus.
I use this tool since Mac Os X 10.5 Leopard, so really lot of years :) Each version is
getting better and better, but the principle is still the same.
In real time you have absolute overview of everything what is going on on your Macintosh.
Or Hackintosh :) It’s sitting in the top menu bar, so you don’t even need to click
anywhere and you still have all informations in front of your eyes all the time.
Realtime info about CPU usage and history, most demanding processes, info about memory
and processor utilization of your GPUs, temperature, clock speed, utilization history of each CPU
core separately, memory pressure, used / free values, applications with biggest memory usage,
again up to 30 days history graph, swap memory info, realtime details about your network
connections, read / write speeds, again also with graphs, utilizations of all connected
disks and server shares, realtime read / write graphs and overview which application is using
and how your disks, temperature, voltage and wattage sensors of your CPU on per core basis,
motherboard temperature and voltages etc.
Simply insanely detailed informations of your whole system and all is presented in very
nice sleek design.
I will show you right now how to install iStat Menus monitoring tool on you Macintosh or
Hackintosh and how to configure it.
Navigate to this web page, link you can find in this video description, scroll down and
click on the Download button.
Once downloaded, open the ZIP file and drag the iStat Menus application to your Applications folder.
Now you can start the app for the first time.
Click on the Install additional components.
And done, installed.
At default it will not look like this, because iStat Menus remember my settings from my previous
installation even after uninstalling for the purpose of this video.
So I recommend to start with a fresh canvas, so disable all groups.
Keep in mind, the order in which you will activate these components, in that same order
they will appear in the top menu bar.
So when I first activate the CPU, it will always be at the first place.
You can highly customize the look of each component, simply just by dragging these available items.
I like to have the name there, I want to have the CPU history graph and also each core activity
and even overall CPU usage percentage.
So that’s how I set up my CPU monitoring.
Here you can view CPU history graph, last hour, day, week or month.
The list here shows your processes order by most demanding on top, you can monitor up
to 15 processes at once.
If you select 5, it will show you 5 most demanding processes, I like to see the maximum 15 processes.
Here you can change the format of CPU usage, for example on 6 core machine with total 12
threads it goes up to 1200%, you can change it to be displayed traditionaly from 0% to 100%.
So right next to CPU I like to have the memory component.
So again from scratch, I want to have the name of the component and I want also see
used vs free overview.
So when you click on it, you can see again, which applications in your system eat most
of your memory, sorted from top to bottom.
Again you can set how many of those applications to see in the overview.
Then I want to see my network activity.
So as you can see I like to have these icons in the top bar, so I can at any time have
realtime information about utilizing my network.
You can also change the colors for upload and download.
You have bunch of options how to customize this component, so set it like you want.
And on the bottom you have again overview, which applications are accessing your network,
realtime speed of reads of upload vs download.
Next to it I want to have my disks activity component.
I have only one disk in this system, but you can see here also all network shares connected.
So I can see immediately, just by looking to the top menu bar actual read and write
speeds of my disk.
I can see used free space on my disk, again also graph format, and you can see even SSD
lifetime here.
If you want in the top bar more disks, just simply drag their name from available disks
to disks to show in menubar.
And the last component I have activated on all my macOS computers are the sensors.
Normally at default you will see it like this.
So I always customize it to see all my cores separately, so I drag each core sensor to
the top menu bar, you can display it as a big icon, so I drag CPU core 2, CPU core 3, etc..
And I want to see also the GPU Die temperature on top.
So now I see temperatures of all cores and GPU.
On multicore systems, it’s quite long, so you can choose the second view, which will
display them in more compact way.
Here you can see temperature graphs of each of your CPU cores and other sensors in your system.
Motherboard fans, CPU frequency, etc..
In the global section you can customize the overall look of iStat Menus.
You can choose color of those tiny graphs, so if I will select for example yellow one,
they will became yellow.
I like my purple :) You can also choose the drop down theme, here to white, light grey,
dark grey, or blurred background.
I like this one.
Very important here is the update frequency, I like it to set to fast, because I’m obscesed
with monitoring of everything :) So it means, the refresh rate of all sensors will be fast.
But again, you can set it as you want.
If you have a notebook, you can choose some useful informations about your battery.
You can display time in several locations, you can also combine some components together.
I personaly don’t like this option, I prefer the way I showed you already.
So I will again activate each component in exact order, in which I want them to be displayed
in the top menu bar.
iStat Menus are running at default in 14 days trial mode, but here from menu you can easily
buy it or register.
But I advice wait with it until my next video, I have some suprise for you :)
Current latest version of iStat Menus is compatible with macOS 10.11 El Capitan up to macOS 10.14 Mojave.
But on their page you can still download even older versions for much older Mac OS X versions.
So if you want to have also absolute control over what is going on in your Macintosh or
Hackintosh, then my recommendation is quite clear.
Go for iStat Menus :) For just $15 it’s a steal.
And as I said - wait for surprise in my next video.
So, I hope you’ve found in my todays video some new inspiration, if so please click on
the Like button below, click also the Share button, so more people can benefit from it.
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You can also join my Mackintosh and Hackintosh groups on Facebook, Reddit or my website,
links are again now in this video description.
So that’s all for today, thank you for watching and see you next time my Macintosh & Hackintosh friends.