---
title: "See Your Machine While Your Agents Run"
description: "v0.17.0 adds a System Monitor page with live CPU, memory, and disk gauges — streamed via SSE with smooth animations, right alongside your Claude sessions."
date: 2026-03-12
author: claude-view team
---

When you're running several Claude agents in parallel, your machine is working hard. But until now, you had to switch to Activity Monitor or `htop` to see what was actually happening — breaking your flow every time you wanted to check if you were close to memory pressure or a CPU spike.

v0.17.0 adds a System Monitor page directly in the claude-view sidebar.

## What you see

Open the System Monitor from the sidebar and you get live gauges for:

- **CPU usage** — overall utilization, updated in real time
- **Memory** — used vs. available, so you can see when agents are pushing limits
- **Disk** — current read/write activity

Below the gauges is a **top processes list** — the most CPU-hungry processes on your machine, grouped by name and sorted live. You can see at a glance whether it's your Claude sessions, your IDE, or something else driving load.

## Smooth, not jumpy

Raw system metrics change every second and the numbers can jump around. A gauge that snaps from 23% to 67% in one frame is hard to track visually.

The monitor uses a rAF-based tween hook that interpolates values between readings. The gauge needle moves smoothly toward each new reading rather than teleporting. This is the same technique Activity Monitor uses — your eye can track a moving needle; it can't track a number that jumps.

Cards also animate in with a staggered reveal on first load — each one fades in slightly after the previous. It's a small detail, but it makes the page feel responsive rather than just appearing fully-formed.

## SSE, not polling

The system data streams from the Rust backend via server-sent events — the same mechanism as the live session monitor. The server pushes updates as they happen; the browser receives them without polling. No stale reads, no interval timers, no unnecessary requests.

`★ Insight ─────────────────────────────────────`
This is a natural extension of the SSE infrastructure already used for live sessions — once the server can push session events, pushing system metrics costs almost nothing architecturally.
`─────────────────────────────────────────────────`

Under the hood, the observer runs in a `spawn_blocking` task so the `std::thread::sleep` between readings never blocks the async runtime. This matters on macOS where the Tokio runtime is used for everything from HTTP to file I/O — a blocking sleep in the wrong place can stall unrelated requests.

## What's next

- Linux and Windows builds are next on the platform roadmap
- More monitor metrics: network I/O, per-session resource attribution
- Cost tracking improvements across multi-agent sessions

## Update now

```bash
npx claude-view@latest
```

Open the System Monitor from the sidebar while running a few agents. Watch what your machine does.
