$ less ~/blog/sysmon-cli-architecture.md
Sysmon-CLI: Building a Cross-Platform System Monitor
Deep dive into the architecture of Sysmon-CLI and how we achieved cross-platform system monitoring with minimal overhead.
System monitoring is harder than it looks. Different OSes expose metrics differently. Polling too often wastes CPU. Too slow misses spikes.
Design Goals
For Sysmon-CLI, we set clear goals:
- Lightweight: <10MB memory footprint
- Fast: <1% CPU usage during monitoring
- Cross-platform: Windows, macOS, Linux
- Real-time: Updates every second
- Accurate: No dropped metrics
Architecture
The Core Engine (Go)
We chose Go for several reasons:
- Great cross-platform support
- Excellent concurrency primitives
- Fast compilation
- Small binaries
Platform-Specific Collection
Each OS requires different syscalls:
- Linux:
/procfilesystem - macOS:
sysctlbyname - Windows: Performance Data Helper (PDH)
We abstracted these into a unified interface.
Efficient Polling
Instead of naive polling, we use:
- Event-driven collection where possible
- Batched metric reads
- Goroutines for concurrent collection
- Ring buffers for history
Export Flexibility
Sysmon-CLI can export to:
- CSV files
- JSON streams
- Prometheus format
- Custom webhooks
Performance
On a typical system:
- 8MB RAM
- 0.3% CPU
- <1ms metric collection time
This lets you monitor continuously without impacting workload.
What's Coming
We're adding:
- GPU monitoring
- Network flow tracking
- Process-level metrics
- Alert rules
Sysmon-CLI is open source. Contributions welcome!
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