Tink vs Glances
Glances is a curses and web psutil dashboard. It is not a mechanic. Tink installs in one command, watches the Linux host, explains what is wrong, and helps you fix it.
Glances shows the meters. Tink answers “why is this VPS sick?”
Accidental sysadmins land on Glances because it is smaller than Netdata and easier than Prometheus. Then disk is at 91%, nginx dies, and the TUI still looks green until a threshold fires — no sentence that says what to run. A filling /var is a Tink warning; it is a Glances bar until you SSH.
Tink is the other job: detect the issue on the machine, say why it happened in plain English, propose the command, and run it only after you approve. Keep using Glances if you already want a live process list in tmux. Use Tink if you run Linux servers and want a mechanic.
| Feature | Tink | Glances |
|---|---|---|
| Setup time | 30 seconds (one curl | sh command) | Minutes — pip/apt install, then pick terminal, web (-w), or client/server and leave a tmux session running |
| What you get | Working monitoring, diagnosis, and approved fixes | Live psutil charts — you still interpret the meters and SSH the box |
| Pricing | Free (Scout) / $9 / $29 per machine per month | LGPL. You still pay the person who stares at Glances at 2am |
| Hidden costs | None — fully managed | A always-on process, Python deps, export plugins, and a second tool when the bar is red but the fix is still yours |
| Monitoring approach | Agent on the server — CPU, disk, services, logs, certs, ports | psutil snapshot: CPU, memory, load, disk I/O, network, processes, sensors. Glances does not parse auth.log or propose a command |
| Configuration | None after install — heuristics and AI | glances.conf thresholds, web bind, password, Influx/MQTT exports, and which meter actually pages you |
| Plain-English diagnosis | Yes — AI explains root cause, impact, and fix | No — you read CPU, memory, disk, and process bars yourself |
| Fix execution | Proposes and executes approved commands with an audit trail | Monitoring only — Glances cannot free disk, restart nginx, or rotate a cert |
| Alerting | Built-in across 8 channels | Threshold colors in the TUI/web UI — routing a page to Telegram or Slack is extra |
| Predictive alerts | Yes — disk fills in ~6 days, memory and CPU trends | Threshold colors — a red disk bar does not forecast fill time in plain English |
| SSH brute-force detection | Built-in — parses auth.log every scan | Not included — Glances does not read host auth.log or journald |
| Machine offline detection | Agent presence monitoring with multi-channel alerts | If the Glances process dies, the dashboard dies with it — nobody is paged unless you built that |
| Public status page | Shareable URL with 90-day history | Not included — Glances has no customer-facing status page |
| Weekly fleet digest | Automated Monday digest + daily brief when issues are open | Not included — a TUI recap is not a plain-English fleet narrative |
| On-call tracking | Built-in /oncall command + incident acknowledgment | Not included — wire Glances exports into PagerDuty or another incident tool |
| Conversation interface | Telegram, WhatsApp, web dashboard, CLI | Terminal, optional web UI, REST API. No mechanic you text when /var filled |
| Learning curve | None — works after install | Low for the TUI; higher once you tune glances.conf, exports, and which alert is noise |
| Best for | Freelancers, small teams, accidental sysadmins (1-50 Linux servers) | Operators who want a live psutil dashboard in tmux and will read the meters themselves |
When Glances is the right choice
Keep using Glances when you already want that exact job:
- A live TUI on the box — CPU, memory, disk I/O, and top processes in one curses screen without a hub.
- Ad-hoc SSH diagnosis — you are already on the host and want meters for the next five minutes, not a standing ops loop.
- Export into an existing TSDB — InfluxDB, Prometheus, MQTT, or CSV is the main question and you already own the graphs.
- No conversation layer wanted — some operators prefer bars only and will never use Telegram.
The real cost of “just run Glances”
The TUI is easy to install. A working ops loop for five Linux boxes is not:
- A healthy dashboard still means you SSH into the host and change the box by hand when it gets sick
- Host fill, nginx, certs, and SSH brute-force never appear unless you built extra checks
- A filling /var is a Tink disk warning on every scan — Glances stays a bar until a threshold fires
- A single VPS with a dead Glances process still needs a mechanic, not another tmux pane
For a 5-server team, Tink Mechanic at $45/month is cheaper than the engineer who keeps Glances exports alive after a green TUI, and every scan includes a diagnosis a quiet meter wall will not type.
No TUI homework. No silent host. One command install.
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