macmon – Mac Monitor

A sudoless performance monitoring CLI tool for Apple Silicon processors.

Motivation

Apple Silicon processors don't provide an easy way to view live power consumption. I was interested in this data while testing local LLM models. asitop is a nice and simple TUI for quickly checking current metrics, but it reads data from powermetrics and requires root privileges. macmon uses a private macOS API to gather similar metrics (essentially the same as powermetrics), but runs without sudo. 🎉

🌟 Features

• 🚫 Runs without sudo
• ⚡ Real-time CPU / GPU / ANE power usage
• 📊 CPU utilization per cluster
• 💾 RAM / Swap usage
• 📈 Historical charts with average and max values
• 🌡️ Average CPU / GPU temperature
• 🎨 Switchable color themes (6 variants)
• 🪟 Can be displayed in a small window
• 🦀 Written in Rust

📥 Installation

• Install macmon using brew:

brew install macmon

• Install macmon using MacPorts:

sudo port install macmon

• Install macmon using Cargo:

cargo install macmon

• Install macmon using Nix:

nix-env -i macmon

🚀 Usage

Usage: macmon [OPTIONS] [COMMAND]

Commands:
  pipe   Output metrics in JSON format
  debug  Print debug information
  help   Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -i, --interval <INTERVAL>  Update interval in milliseconds [default: 1000]
  -h, --help                 Print help
  -V, --version              Print version

Controls:
  c - change color
  v - switch charts view: gauge / sparkline
  q - quit

🚰 Piping

You can use the pipe subcommand to output metrics in JSON format, which makes it suitable for piping into other tools or scripts. For example:

macmon pipe | jq

This command runs macmon in "pipe" mode and sends the output to jq for pretty-printing.

You can also specify the number of samples to collect using the -s or --samples parameter (default: 0, which runs indefinitely), and set the update interval in milliseconds using the -i or --interval parameter (default: 1000 ms). For example:

macmon pipe -s 10 -i 500 | jq

This will collect 10 samples with an update interval of 500 milliseconds.

Output

{
  "timestamp": "2025-02-24T20:38:15.427569+00:00",
  "temp": {
    "cpu_temp_avg": 43.73614,         // Celsius
    "gpu_temp_avg": 36.95167          // Celsius
  },
  "memory": {
    "ram_total": 25769803776,         // Bytes
    "ram_usage": 20985479168,         // Bytes
    "swap_total": 4294967296,         // Bytes
    "swap_usage": 2602434560          // Bytes
  },
  "ecpu_usage": [1181, 0.082656614],  // (Frequency MHz, Usage %)
  "pcpu_usage": [1974, 0.015181795],  // (Frequency MHz, Usage %)
  "gpu_usage": [461, 0.021497859],    // (Frequency MHz, Usage %)
  "cpu_power": 0.20486385,            // Watts
  "gpu_power": 0.017451683,           // Watts
  "ane_power": 0.0,                   // Watts
  "all_power": 0.22231553,            // Watts
  "sys_power": 5.876533,              // Watts
  "ram_power": 0.11635789,            // Watts
  "gpu_ram_power": 0.0009615385       // Watts (not sure what it means)
}

📦 Build from Source

1. Install Rust toolchain

2. Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/vladkens/macmon.git && cd macmon

3. Build and run:

cargo run -r

🤝 Contributing

We love contributions! Whether you have ideas, suggestions, or bug reports, feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request. Your input is essential to helping us improve macmon. 💪

📝 License

macmon is distributed under the MIT License. For more details, check out the LICENSE file.

🔍 See also

• tlkh/asitop – The original tool. Written in Python, requires sudo.
• dehydratedpotato/socpowerbud – Written in Objective-C, sudoless, no TUI.
• op06072/NeoAsitop – Written in Swift, sudoless.
• graelo/pumas – Written in Rust, requires sudo.
• context-labs/mactop – Written in Go, requires sudo.

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P.S. One more thing... Monitoring your Mac's performance with macmon is like having a personal trainer for your processor — keeping those cores in shape! 💪