[alex-]

psutil (https://pythonhosted.org/psutil/) is awesome for collecting valuable monitoring information.

pyrasite (http://pyrasite.com/) will let you inject code into a process. This can be used to add monitoring of private internal state etc (if you have no other options).

If you want to have locally hosted graphs then grafana and influx are my current tools of choice.

It is going to be more work than swiping a credit card, but not a crazy amount.

[willangley]

pyrasite can make the child process slow down markedly; this came up for me when injecting profilers into cinnamon-screensaver to try to root cause a memory leak (https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1652489)

cinnamon-screensaver would take multiple seconds to lock the screen even after I'd stopped profiling and exited the interpreter I'd injected, and I wound up restarting it so I could lock my screen quickly again.

I don't know why this happened, but it's enough to make me think twice, and I'm definitely going to double-check my process is still performing as I hope after injecting it with pyrasite in the future.