Need to know what your Mac (Macs) is up to while you’re away from your desk? Bjango’s iStat — System Monitoring will keep you posted and it will do that very well.

This powerful little utility enables iPhoners to remotely monitor their Macs as well as their iPhone’s inner workings.

Setup requires your installing iStat Server, a free desktop widget for your Mac (OS X.4 or higher). Step two, launch the widget and it will display a passcode. Step three, launch iStat, enter the widget’s passcode and you’re good to go, all within seconds.

You can use iStat to monitor — using Bonjour or TCP/IP — each Mac’s  CPU, memory, disk storage, temperatures, uptime and load averages.

To ping or run a traceroute, you enter IP addresses in the space provided using iPhone’s familiar keyboard. It sure would be nice for it to default to the number keyboard instead of the QWERTY keyboard as it does now. It would be even better if the developers of iStat — System Monitoring were able to substitute the basic keyboard with that generous and good-looking number pad currently used to enter passcodes.

You can also ping and run a traceroute to see whether your Mac (or any other machine) is accessible and follow the route packets take to get to wherever they’re going.

You have the option under Settings to select the stats you would like the app to display as well as configure graphs, temperature and whether you want to pause ping when the screen is locked.

iStat also displays stats for your iPhone: memory, available storage, IP and cell addresses, uptime, load, unique identifier and Wi-Fi MAC address. You can email your unique ID and MAC address with a button tap.

Last, there a Free Memory button if you need to clear out the flotsam and jetsam left behind by other apps.

iStat — System Monitoring is a well-crafted and polished app with a lot of bang for the buck. It just works — without your having to do much of anything.

The average home Mac user might not use iStat — System Monitoring all that much, but if you’re tasked with looking after more than a couple of Macs, you can’t beat this one for checking their vital signs.

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app category: Editor's Picks, Utilities