CCDash

CCDash brings the elegance of modern web dashboards to the terminal, creating a beautiful, efficient monitoring solution for developers who live and breathe the command line. It provides comprehensive visibility into system resources, Claude Code token consumption, and tmux session management—all in a sleek terminal interface that feels native to your workflow. For terminal-native developers who consider switching to a browser a context-switch tax, CCDash brings production-grade monitoring into your environment of choice.

Real-Time System Monitoring

The dashboard features real-time graphs of CPU, memory, and network usage with customizable refresh rates (0.5s to 60s intervals) and multiple color themes (nord, dracula, solarized, custom). CPU graphs show per-core utilization with sparklines for trend visualization, highlight processes consuming excessive resources, and track temperature sensors on supported hardware. Memory monitoring displays RAM usage broken down by process, tracks swap usage and page fault rates, and alerts when approaching OOM conditions before they cause crashes.

Network monitoring captures bandwidth usage on all interfaces, showing download/upload rates with historical trends, tracking packet loss and error rates, and identifying which processes are consuming bandwidth. The connection table displays active network connections with remote hosts, ports, and protocols, helping identify unexpected connections or bandwidth hogs. For remote development, CCDash shows SSH session counts and helps diagnose network-related slowdowns.

Disk I/O monitoring tracks read/write operations per second, displays which processes are causing disk thrashing, shows filesystem capacity and inode usage, and alerts on low disk space before it impacts development work. The system uptime tracker includes load averages (1min, 5min, 15min), displays system boot time and recent reboots, and tracks service restarts and crashes. This comprehensive view prevents performance mysteries from interrupting your flow.

Claude Code Token Tracking

For Claude Code users, CCDash provides specialized tracking of token consumption across all sessions. It monitors API calls in real-time capturing input/output token counts, tracks cumulative usage per session and across all sessions, and maintains historical token consumption trends over days, weeks, and months. The cost estimator multiplies token counts by current API pricing for Anthropic's tier structure, showing both session-specific and monthly total costs, projecting future costs based on current usage patterns, and alerting when approaching budget thresholds.

Token usage insights identify which operations consume the most tokens through heatmaps showing token usage by hour of day, breakdowns by operation type (code generation, refactoring, testing), and comparisons across different Claude models (Opus vs Sonnet vs Haiku). These insights help developers optimize prompts to reduce token usage, choose appropriate models for different tasks, and identify token-heavy workflows that might benefit from alternative approaches.

Context window management displays current context utilization percentages, warns when conversations approach max context limits, and suggests when to start fresh sessions to avoid degraded performance. For large codebases where context management is critical, these warnings prevent wasted API calls on conversations that will fail due to context overflow. The session analyzer shows which files and conversations are consuming context, helping you trim unnecessary context to fit within limits.

Tmux Session Management

The tmux integration provides centralized control over terminal multiplexer sessions. The session browser lists all active tmux sessions with window and pane counts, shows session creation times and activity indicators, and allows quick switching between sessions without typing tmux commands. Session health monitoring tracks unresponsive panes that might be hung, identifies zombie processes still holding panes, and detects sessions you've forgotten about consuming resources.

From within CCDash you can create new tmux sessions with templated configurations, attach to existing sessions seamlessly, send commands to specific panes in other sessions, and kill hung sessions or individual panes. The pane viewer shows a tree structure of sessions → windows → panes with process information and current working directory for each pane. This bird's-eye view of your terminal ecosystem helps manage complex multi-session development environments.

Pre-configured layouts enable one-click setup of common development environments like frontend (editor + build watcher + dev server), backend (editor + API server + database client), full-stack (all of the above in a organized layout), or custom layouts saved from previous sessions. These layouts eliminate the tedium of manually setting up the same terminal arrangement for each project.

Extensibility and Integration

Built with Python's rich library ecosystem using libraries like 'rich' for beautiful terminal rendering, 'psutil' for cross-platform system metrics, 'prometheus_client' for metrics export, and 'libtmux' for tmux integration. The plugin architecture allows extending functionality without modifying core code. Community plugins add git repository status monitoring, Docker container management, Kubernetes pod watching, custom API endpoint polling, and integration with monitoring services like DataDog or Grafana.

Metrics export supports multiple formats including Prometheus exposition format for scraping by monitoring systems, JSON over HTTP for custom integrations, StatsD protocol for time-series databases, and CSV exports for offline analysis. This makes CCDash suitable not just for interactive monitoring but as a metrics collector in larger observability stacks. The exported data can feed into alerting systems, drive long-term capacity planning, or provide audit trails for infrastructure usage.

The scriptable API enables automation of common tasks through Python scripts that query current metrics, execute actions like session management, configure dashboard layouts programmatically, and schedule metric collection. The API supports both synchronous calls for one-off scripts and async/await patterns for long-running automations. Example scripts in the repository demonstrate automated cleanup of zombie sessions, cost optimization by scheduling intensive workloads during off-peak hours, and alerting integrations that send Slack notifications when resource usage spikes.

Performance and Resource Efficiency

CCDash is designed to be lightweight and fast, consuming minimal system resources even while continuously monitoring. It achieves <1% CPU usage during normal operation, <50MB RAM footprint (less than most electron apps), and efficient I/O through batch metric collection. The rendering engine only updates changed sections of the terminal using dirty region tracking, updates at configurable refresh rates to balance freshness with resource usage, and pauses updates when the terminal is not visible to save even more resources.

Cross-platform support works seamlessly on Linux with full feature set including temperature monitoring and detailed I/O stats, macOS with complete functionality using native APIs, and Windows via WSL with most features available (native Windows support in development). The consistent experience across platforms lets developers maintain the same workflow whether on local machines, remote servers, or different operating systems.

Remote Server Monitoring

For managing multiple remote servers, CCDash supports SSH tunneling to monitor remote machines, aggregate views combining metrics from multiple hosts, and synchronized dashboards showing all servers simultaneously. The split-pane layout displays multiple servers side-by-side with color-coded health indicators, synchronized scrolling across hosts, and quick navigation between machines. This is invaluable for managing distributed development environments, monitoring production servers from your laptop, or overseeing infrastructure health across a fleet of machines.

The connection manager remembers SSH credentials securely in the system keychain, supports jump hosts and bastion servers for accessing internal networks, and maintains persistent connections with automatic reconnection on network interruptions. When a connection drops, CCDash shows cached historical data until reconnection succeeds, preventing you from losing context due to transient network issues.