Ubuntu – How to configure the system monitor indicator (indicator-sysmonitor)

System Monitor Indicator is quite simple / flexible. You can add basically any script as custom sensor. The output it produces will then appear where you put its placeholder. I am using this to extract information from the output of sensors like this:

sensors | grep temp1 | awk '{print $2}' | sed 's/+//' 

to exctract the temperature or

sensors | grep fan1 | awk '{print $2}'

to extract the fan speed.

Just click on New, enter a name and a description and the respective lines from above under Command as shown here:

PS: After upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 the tool seemed to have problems to read the configuration file, resulting in a crash when I tried to add sensors. Removing .indicator-sysmonitor.json from my home directory fixed this.

The original reason why this appeared seems to be that I had my mouse over the indicator and then scrolled down accidentally.

From System Monitor settings, open "Indicator items", click on the empty row, and click "Down" button until that empty row sits at the bottom. That makes the textual Disk indicator disappear: