SysGauge launches much like any other PC system monitor. Choose one of the usual counters (CPU usage, memory usage, disk activity, disk transfer rate, network transfer rate), its current, average and minimum values are displayed, and a line graph shows how your counter is changing in real time.

What's interesting is that these aren't the only values you can monitor. Click "Add" and you'll find counters for the total number of processes or threads; CPU usage by individual process, all user or all system processes; disk reads or writes, for specific drives or everything; network transfer, transmit or receive rate, for specific or all network cards; server sessions, server option files, terminal sessions, user logons, logon errors, access denied errors and more.

Even better, SysGauge enables connecting to and monitoring network computers.

For all its functionality, this is very easy to use. We clicked Add, selected Process Status, chose Process Handle Count as the parameter to monitor and selected Chrome from the process list. This instantly appeared in the list along with Current, Average, Minimum and Maximum counts, and clicking it displayed the current value and a history graph.

An impressive set of reporting options enabled saving reports on demand or automatically at regular intervals. HTML, PDF, Excel, CSV, TXT and XML formats are supported.

SysGauge also supports carrying out multiple actions based on counter values. You could display a warning if a counter reached 1,000, for instance; play a sound if it reached 2,000; send an email if it reached 3,000; maybe shut down or restart the PC if it topped 4,000: whatever combination of values and actions makes sense to you.