Python Tools For IT Administrators using psutils and click module

Psutil
Another Python package quite useful for IT Administration is psutil. Short for “process and system utilities,” psutil is a library that enables admins and developers to quickly gather information on running processes and system utilization. It is cross-platform, and is typically used for monitoring the state of systems or managing processes.

For instance, an admin may need to pull some CPU statistics and disk usage for the C drive on a machine they are tasked with monitoring, or else during issue troubleshooting. With psutil, this can be accomplished with short code snippet:

Click
Click is a Python package for use in creating CLIs quickly and efficiently. In today’s world, System Administrators are writing scripts with greater frequency. Click enables them to do so in a manner that allows them easy access to parameterized functions via the command line, streamlining the process for gathering information or executing commonly performed tasks.

Taking the psutil use case above, where a sysadmin pulled cpu stats and disk usage information, we can now create a script using Click that gives us more control over what’s being pulled by leveraging an argument named task.
If we provide all as the value for the task argument, we will pull both cpu stats and disk usage information. On the other hand, cpu will simply pull cpu stats and disk will only pull disk usage information.