Show HN: SnapSys – A lightweight CLI tool to capture system hardware snapshots

7 hours ago 2

SnapSys is a lightweight, purpose-built CLI tool for capturing CPU, memory, and disk usage at fixed intervals, outputting the results in clean, structured JSONL format. Designed for system administrators, developers, DevOps engineers, and performance testers, SnapSys is ideal for monitoring system behavior, debugging performance issues, or capturing lightweight metrics during CI/CD pipelines or local build processes. Whether you're analyzing resource usage in virtual machines, testing workloads in Docker containers, or gathering evidence for incident reports, SnapSys fits seamlessly into your workflow.

⚠️ SnapSys is currently developed and tested for Linux systems only.

Track CPU, Memory, and Disk usage at defined intervals
Output in JSONL format for easy processing and analysis
Minimal dependencies – just Go and your shell
Includes automatic fallback output path if none is provided

Installation (via go install)

To install the latest version:

go install github.com/MarcusMJV/snapsys@latest

Ensure ~/go/bin is in your $PATH:

export PATH="$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin"

Once installed, use it like:

Download a Precompiled Binary

Visit the Releases Page

Download the binary called snapsys

In your terminal run

Run it:

To simplify usage:

sudo mv snapsys /usr/local/bin/snapsys snapsys snapshot

This will collect system stats every 3 seconds for 30 seconds, and write to a default path like:

./snapsys_runs/snaprun_2025-06-16_13-00-00.jsonl

Flag Default Description

--duration	30s	Total time to run the snapshot
--interval	3s	Time between each snapshot (minimum 1s)
--output	(auto-generated)	Output file path (.jsonl required if specified)

⚠️ If the interval is set below 1s, SnapSys will default it to 1s and warn the user.

⚠️ If you use --output, the file must end in .jsonl.

SnapSys is ideal for:

Lightweight benchmarking in Linux VMs or containers
Capturing performance stats during builds or deployments
Logging system behavior for incident reports
Analyzing trends across time during load tests

Each snapshot is written as a line in JSON:

{"timestamp":"2025-06-16T13:00:00Z","cpu":{"usage_pct":12.8, ...},"memory":{"usage_pct":31.9, ...},"disks":{"/":{...}}}

This is great for:

Ingesting into tools like Elasticsearch
Plotting in Python, Grafana, etc.
Please see example.jsonl file for full example

Sub-second snapshot support using concurrent snapshot routines
Additional system metrics:
- Uptime
- Hostname and kernel version
- Network interface stats (bytes in/out, errors, drops)
- System load average
Snapshot tagging and summaries
Ability to push .jsonl data to remote HTTP APIs
Support for compressed output (.jsonl.gz)
Interactive shell mode for quick inspection and dev workflows
CSV export format option