Visual Server Monitoring Made Easy with Sampler: Install & Configure

Sampler Introduction

Sampler is a shell‑based visual monitoring tool that uses simple YAML files for configuration and can display server metrics such as CPU, memory, network, and container status. It has gained over 12k stars on GitHub.

Installation

Download the Sampler binary and place it in

/usr/local/bin

:

<code># Download sampler package to /usr/local/bin
sudo wget https://github.com/sqshq/sampler/releases/download/v1.1.0/sampler-1.1.0-linux-amd64 -O /usr/local/bin/sampler
# Make the binary executable
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/sampler</code>

After installation, the executable

sampler

is available in

/usr/local/bin

.

Usage

Configure monitoring scripts in a

yaml

file and run Sampler with the configuration:

<code># Make the config file executable
chmod +x config.yml
# Start Sampler with the config
sampler -c config.yml</code>

Examples of YAML snippets:

<code>sparklines:
  - title: CPU usage(%)
    rate-ms: 200
    scale: 0
    sample: ps -A -o %cpu | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s}'
  - title: RAM free(MB)
    rate-ms: 200
    scale: 0
    sample: free -m | grep "Mem:" | awk '{print $4}'

textboxes:
  - title: Docker containers stats
    rate-ms: 500
    sample: docker stats --no-stream --format "table {{.Name}}\t{{.CPUPerc}}\t{{.MemUsage}}\t{{.PIDs}}"

barcharts:
  - title: Local network activity
    rate-ms: 500
    items:
      - label: UDP bytes in
        sample: netstat -anu | awk '{sum += $2} END {print sum}'
      - label: UDP bytes out
        sample: netstat -anu | awk '{sum += $3} END {print sum}'
      - label: TCP bytes in
        sample: netstat -ant | awk '{sum += $2} END {print sum}'
      - label: TCP bytes out
        sample: netstat -ant | awk '{sum += $3} END {print sum}'

asciiboxes:
  - title: CST time
    rate-ms: 500
    font: 2d
    border: false
    color: 43
    sample: env TZ=Asia/Shanghai date +%r</code>

Running Sampler with these configurations displays real‑time charts, sparklines, and text boxes for the selected metrics.

Summary

Sampler provides an intuitive, visual way to monitor server health and can also be extended to monitor middleware such as MySQL, MongoDB, and Kafka.

Project Address

GitHub repository: https://github.com/sqshq/sampler