Vitals: A More Intuitive Mac System Monitoring App Than Activity Monitor

October 21, 2026 · 9 min read App+1 | Vitals: What's slowing down your Mac? It's more intuitive and easier to use than Activity Monitor. Lead author ElijahLee, a Minorities author, has won the "Best Author" title multiple times 🥇 and received several desk lamp prizes 🎁. ElijahLee ElijahLee, a Minorities author, has won the "Best Author" title multiple times 🥇 and received several desk lamp prizes 🎁. Co-author ElijahLee, a Minorities author, has won the "Best Author" title multiple times 🥇 and received several desk lamp prizes 🎁. ElijahLee ElijahLee, a Minorities author, has won the "Best Author" title multiple times 🥇 and received several desk lamp prizes 🎁.

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Vitals is a system monitoring app for macOS that monitors hardware metrics such as CPU, memory, disk, network, GPU, battery, and temperature in real time, and integrates app resource usage, historical data, and anomaly alerts into a single app. It also offers a standalone app window, menu bar monitoring, and an MCP service, so users can choose how to view information according to their habits, and AI assistants can also participate in analyzing system status.

On macOS, the built-in Activity Monitor provides similar functionality, but when we want to find out exactly how much resources a particular app is consuming, searching and investigating in Activity Monitor is quite laborious. Vitals's design approach is to regroup these processes under the app they belong to, directly presenting the resource consumption of each app.

Put your Mac's operating status in one window

All metrics, one-page overview

When you open Vitals's standalone window, the first thing you see is the "Overview." It summarizes the Mac's current main hardware metrics, including the usage of six hardware components: CPU, memory, GPU, disk, network, and battery. We don't need to switch between many pages to form an initial judgment about the operating status of the entire computer.

This information is not simply stacked together. Vitals chooses the appropriate presentation format based on how different hardware works, reflecting hardware operation through numbers, charts, progress bars, and status information. We can view both current readings and observe how metrics have changed over a recent period.

For example, the CPU and GPU sections show processor usage and load; the memory section presents used memory, memory pressure, and the distribution of different memory types; the disk section shows remaining capacity, read/write speeds, and other data; in addition, information such as battery, temperature, fans, sound, and Bluetooth devices can also be included in monitoring.

Real-time change display is an important feature of the overview page. CPU usage, network speed, and memory usage change as apps run, and charts help us observe the process of load changes. When a metric fluctuates noticeably, we can go further into the corresponding detail page to view more specific data and the resource usage of related apps.

This overall-to-local browsing method is suitable for everyday troubleshooting. For example, if you notice that your Mac's memory usage keeps rising, you can go directly to the memory page to check which apps are using more resources; if the computer heats up and fan speed increases, you can check metrics such as CPU, GPU, and temperature to further determine whether there is sustained high load.

Metric details, detailed analysis on separate pages

The "Overview" page is responsible for quick judgment and problem localization, while the "Metric Details" pages provide the information needed for further analysis. Vitals designs separate pages for CPU, memory, disk, network, GPU, sound, Bluetooth, and more, and also includes projects (development servers, compilers, etc.) in the monitoring scope.

Each page organizes data around the corresponding monitoring target, where we can view real-time status, historical curves, apps with high resource usage, and other information related to that metric.

CPU: Processor usage, load changes, and activity of related apps. Through real-time curves and app lists, determine where the current computing tasks mainly come from, and further check whether a certain app is continuously occupying processor resources.

Memory: Displays memory usage, breaks it down by different memory types, and lists apps that consume more memory. For users who often run browsers, development environments, virtual machines, or local AI models at the same time, this information helps understand the sources of memory pressure.

Battery: Provides information such as battery level, power consumption, and battery health; temperature and fan-related data can also help determine whether the hardware is under high load.

Sound: You can view system sound and the volume of each app.

Bluetooth: Displays information such as the battery level of connected Bluetooth devices.

Projects: For developers, it can summarize development processes by project and present information such as development servers and open ports, reducing the work of manually checking background services.

Analyze resource consumption by app

An important difference between Vitals and traditional system monitoring tools is that it uses apps as the main unit of resource statistics.

On macOS, the built-in Activity Monitor already provides fairly complete hardware monitoring and process management features. However, when we want to know exactly which app is consuming resources, we need to identify each process ourselves and manually aggregate the relevant numbers.

Vitals consolidates resource usage under the app it belongs to, showing app-level CPU, memory, energy, disk, and network usage. We can first compare the overall consumption of different apps, then expand a specific app to further inspect the individual processes it contains.

This way of organizing data brings resource analysis closer to how users actually use their computers. We often encounter situations like "Chrome is using too much memory" or "VS Code makes the computer slow when compiling." Vitals presents data by app, directly answering the questions users care about most.

Another value of tallying resource usage by app is that it can be combined with historical records. Vitals can not only show which app is currently using more resources, but also track app usage over time. We can compare resource consumption across different time periods and observe whether an app maintains a high load over the long term, or whether its memory usage keeps growing.

When the system stutters, heats up, fan speed increases, or battery drains faster, these historical records can help us determine whether the problem is a brief load spike or persistent abnormal activity.

Vitals also supports setting resource alerts for specific apps. For example, you can set a notification to appear after an app's memory usage exceeds a specified value and stays there for a period of time. For users who frequently run large projects, many browser tabs, or local AI models, this is more convenient than relying solely on manually checking the monitoring interface.

From a user experience perspective, Vitals advances "viewing resource numbers" to "identifying the source of resources, observing the process of change, and pinpointing possible problems." It reduces the work of manually aggregating processes and makes it easier to form a repeatable troubleshooting process for daily system maintenance.

Another important feature of Vitals is that it provides an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, allowing AI assistants that support MCP to call tools and read system data within the scope of authorization to help users analyze hardware problems.

Vitals' MCP integration supports tools such as Claude, Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. After enabling the integration in settings, we can directly ask about the Mac's operating status in the chat interfaces of these AI assistants, without having to open Vitals first and manually organize the data each time.

In the app, go to the "Integrations" page in settings, enable AI assistant queries, then install the AI tool you need to connect, and follow the configuration prompts to complete the connection. Once successful, we can ask questions directly in natural language. For example, check the current Mac's memory usage, find apps with high CPU load, check the currently running development servers, and so on.

None of these questions require prior knowledge of complex command-line operations. The AI assistant can obtain the data provided by Vitals through MCP and then organize an answer based on the question.

System monitoring tools can read app names, process information, resource usage, and data related to development projects, so privacy is worth paying attention to. According to Vitals' official privacy statement, the app records system and app resource usage history locally, does not require users to register an account, and does not proactively send these monitoring data to Vitals' servers.

Supports custom appearance, plus other thoughtful features

As a system monitoring tool, Vitals departs from the rigid style of the system Activity Monitor and offers a minimalist, customizable window interface.

For chart color schemes, Vitals offers three options: Vitals, Monochrome, and Accessibility. Users can keep the app's original colorful charts, choose a more restrained monochrome scheme, or use accessible colors that are easy to distinguish. Different schemes suit different visual preferences and usage environments.

Vitals also provides extensive customization in settings, bringing together options such as chart color scheme, number font, font weight, and layout density. Font settings are also flexible, including options such as Rounded, San Francisco, SF Mono, and New York, and users can also choose other fonts installed on the Mac (such as MacintoshSkeletal, which was used for "hello" at WWDC 26). For a system monitoring interface, the choice of font affects the legibility of numbers and also changes the overall visual style of the interface. These settings support live preview, so after adjusting colors, fonts, and spacing, you can directly observe the changes in the interface.

Vitals supports exporting monitoring results as images, turning the current system status into an image suitable for saving or sharing. Whether you want to show the overall operation of the Mac or highlight memory usage, CPU usage, and the main resource-consuming apps, you can present the data through the corresponding export format. For data that requires deeper analysis, Vitals also supports exporting history as CSV. The new version further improves the history data export capability, allowing you to separately obtain app data counted by day, Mac data counted by hour, and system readings recorded every five minutes, making it convenient for users to continue analysis in tools such as spreadsheets.

Window pinning is another practical design. After enabling always on top, Vitals can remain displayed in front of other app windows. When you are doing video editing, code compilation, model inference, or large file processing, you can continuously observe resource changes. There is no need to frequently switch windows when troubleshooting, and this method is especially convenient for users who need to run tests while observing CPU and memory changes.

In the menu bar, Vitals provides a lightweight monitoring display window. It is worth mentioning that in the app's settings, we can use Vitals to keep the metrics CPU, memory, GPU, network, disk, temperature, battery, and power pinned in the menu bar. Whichever metric you care about, you can have that metric's usage displayed persistently. When resource usage reaches a high load level, Vitals also supports highlighting the readings in red to remind you to perform timely maintenance.

Summary: From system monitoring to intelligent analysis

Vitals integrates system status, app resource consumption, history, and development environment management into a unified monitoring tool. For resource analysis, Vitals groups related processes by app, reducing the work of manually summarizing resource usage. The MCP integration provides a new way to use this system monitoring capability, further saving users' time and effort.

For users who only need to occasionally check CPU or memory usage, the Activity Monitor built into macOS is already sufficient. If you want to analyze app resource consumption more intuitively, track historical changes, or often perform development and local AI inference on a Mac, then the integrated monitoring and AI collaboration capabilities provided by Vitals are more worth trying.

Vitals uses a one-time purchase model; after purchase, you can continue using it, and it includes subsequent updates with no subscription fee required. As of now, the price shown on the official website is $9, with a regular price of $39 later. If you are not satisfied, you can request a refund within 14 days of purchase. However, this price is a phased launch price, and the actual selling price and remaining discounted slots are subject to the official website.

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