Vitals

Mac users juggling many apps, dev projects and local AI tools find Activity Monitor hard to read because it lists around a thousand individual processes, many of them helper processes like 'Google Chrome Helper', instead of grouping them by app. Developers running coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI or Cursor have no easy way to see what each agent session started (dev servers, browsers, tool servers) or how much of their AI plan limits (sessions, weekly or monthly caps) remain. People also lack visibility into idle dev servers consuming memory and ports, or per-container resource use in Docker. Today they resort to manually scanning Activity Monitor or terminal output and guessing, as one user quote puts it, Activity Monitor is 'horrible when juggling dev projects and local AI'.

Vitals is a menu bar monitor for Mac that groups processes into roughly 60 apps instead of around 1,000 processes, giving each app one row and one figure for CPU, memory, GPU, disk, network and power. It adds an Agents tab that shows running coding agent sessions (Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor), what each session started, and how much is left on AI usage plans with reset times and token counts for Claude Code and Codex. It also surfaces dev servers and ports by project (flagging idle ones), Docker container stats, a per-app volume mixer, Bluetooth device battery levels, temperature and fan speed, and battery health and drain by app. A built-in MCP server lets assistants like Claude, Codex and Cursor query Vitals about what is running or what is on a port, and request to quit something, though Vitals always asks the user for confirmation before quitting anything. The app keeps up to a year of history, hour by hour, and sends alerts when an app misbehaves.