custom monitoring script in ubuntu

I wanted to have a way to run something repeteadly and have visual output. Luckily, indicator-sysmonitor allows you to configure a custom script. You can get a full description on how to do it, by following this link. I find it very useful to add the path to a shell script, and to call whatever you want from it. So, I’ve configured the path to be ~/code/sysmenu.sh, with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
cd /home/geo/code/sidekiq-queue
ruby extractor.rb

Of course, you could run node, python, c, or whatever your heart desires. Just make sure your script produces output, since that output is what’s displayed by your indicator. For example, I use it to keep track of the jobs that are being processed by sidekiq, how many jobs are running, how many are queued, and how many scheduled.