OLD-SCHOOL MONITORING
Psensor is fairly old, but there are two grandparents of graphical monitoring that we’d get in trouble for not mentioning. One is Gkrellm, a GTK2 utility that displays a stack of sensor widgetry. And the other is Conky, which decorates your deskop wallpaper with system information (okay, it actually is drawing in a transparent, undecorated window, but the result is the same).
Conky’s default configuration (in Ubuntu) shows CPU frequencies and top processes, but the system monitoring program can be configured to display anything and everything, including local weather forecasts, currently playing music and RSS feeds. There’s a vibrant community of users sharing their .conkyrc config files, see for example this thread on the Arch Forums (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=39906).
If you like old-school monitoring, and don’t mind awkwardly grepping and chopping output with Awk, Grep and Cut, then you can fill a terminal window with the data of your choosing. One way to do this is to use a terminal multiplexer like Tmux, which besides enabling you to detach sessions (useful for leaving things running on remote machines), lets you split your terminal vertically and horizontally. In each pane, you can watch various commands. For example you can monitor I/O throughput if you install and run iotop -op . You could do a similar thing for hard drive temperatures using smartctl , although this requires root. It’s also fairly CPU intensive so you’ll want to drop the refresh interval to five seconds, like so:
# watch -t -n 5 “smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Cel | cut -c88-90”
Oh and if you’re using the AMDGPU driver you’ll find greppables in /sys/ kernel/debug/dri/0/amdgpu_pm_info.