Building a Real-Time System Monitor with Zig, Bun, and WebSockets

Intro Most monitoring tools are either bloated or cloud-dependent. I wanted something minimal, local, and fast so I built one using Zig for system-level collection and Bun for a real-time WebSocket API. Here is how I approached it. System architecture The core idea is simple: collect system metrics at regular intervals, store them in a database for later access, and broadcast updates to a web interface in real time. Metric collectors The first step is a set of metric collectors that reads system metrics ands send them to the API every second. I chose the Zig programming language for this. Why Zig? Zig is a modern alternative to C, offering better safety and performance while giving explicit control over memory. This makes it ideal for building lightweight tools with minimal overhead. Zig provides native access to system resources which enables direct interaction with hardware while offering stronger memory checks than C. To keep this article concise, I'll explain each metric collector