Process Viewer

A sysops toolkit for scanning, monitoring, and managing system processes. Record observations, track alerts, run benchmarks, and generate reports — all from the command line with persistent local storage.

Quick Start

bash scripts/script.sh <command> [args...]

Commands

Core Operations

• scan <input> — Record a process scan entry (without args: show recent scans)
• monitor <input> — Log a monitoring observation (without args: show recent entries)
• report <input> — Create a report entry (without args: show recent reports)
• alert <input> — Log an alert or warning (without args: show recent alerts)
• top <input> — Record top-process data (without args: show recent entries)
• usage <input> — Track resource usage (without args: show recent entries)
• check <input> — Run or log a health check (without args: show recent checks)
• fix <input> — Document a fix applied (without args: show recent fixes)

Maintenance

• cleanup <input> — Record a cleanup action (without args: show recent cleanups)
• backup <input> — Log a backup operation (without args: show recent backups)
• restore <input> — Log a restore operation (without args: show recent restores)
• log <input> — Add a general log entry (without args: show recent logs)

Analysis

• benchmark <input> — Record benchmark results (without args: show recent benchmarks)
• compare <input> — Log comparison data (without args: show recent comparisons)

Utilities

• stats — Show summary statistics across all entry types
• export <fmt> — Export all data (formats: json, csv, txt)
• search <term> — Search across all log files for a keyword
• recent — Show the 20 most recent activity log entries
• status — Display health check: version, data dir, entry count, disk usage
• help — Show available commands
• version — Print version (v2.0.0)

Each command accepts free-text input. When called without arguments, it displays the most recent 20 entries for that category.

Data Storage

All data is stored as plain-text log files in:

~/.local/share/process-viewer/
├── scan.log          # Process scan entries
├── monitor.log       # Monitoring observations
├── report.log        # Reports
├── alert.log         # Alerts and warnings
├── top.log           # Top-process snapshots
├── usage.log         # Resource usage records
├── check.log         # Health check records
├── fix.log           # Applied fixes
├── cleanup.log       # Cleanup actions
├── backup.log        # Backup operations
├── restore.log       # Restore operations
├── log.log           # General log entries
├── benchmark.log     # Benchmark results
├── compare.log       # Comparison data
└── history.log       # Unified activity history

Each entry is stored as YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM|<input> — one line per record. The history.log file tracks all commands chronologically.

Requirements

• Bash 4.0+ with set -euo pipefail
• Standard Unix utilities: date, wc, du, tail, grep, sed, cat, basename
• No external dependencies, no network access required
• Write access to ~/.local/share/process-viewer/

When to Use

1. Tracking system processes over time — Use scan and monitor to build a log of process observations for later review or trend analysis
2. Incident response documentation — Use alert to log warnings, fix to document remediation steps, and report to create post-incident summaries
3. Performance benchmarking — Use benchmark and compare to record and contrast performance measurements across different configurations or time periods
4. Backup and recovery auditing — Use backup and restore to maintain an audit trail of data protection operations
5. Periodic system health reviews — Use status for a quick health check, stats for an overview, and export json to archive data for external analysis

Examples

# Scan and record a process observation
process-viewer scan "nginx worker count: 4, memory 128MB"

# Log a monitoring alert
process-viewer alert "CPU usage exceeded 90% on web-server-03"

# Document a fix
process-viewer fix "Restarted memcached after OOM kill"

# Run a benchmark and record it
process-viewer benchmark "Disk I/O test: 450MB/s sequential read"

# View summary statistics across all categories
process-viewer stats

# Export everything to JSON for external processing
process-viewer export json

# Search all logs for a specific term
process-viewer search "nginx"

# Check system status
process-viewer status

Configuration

Set PROCESS_VIEWER_DIR environment variable to override the default data directory. Default: ~/.local/share/process-viewer/

Output

All commands output to stdout. Redirect to a file with process-viewer <command> > output.txt. Export formats (json, csv, txt) write to the data directory and report the output path and file size.

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