Smart Personal Dashboard

A modern, high‑performance system‑monitoring dashboard built with Qt 6 and C++. The application provides real‑time insight into system health and lets you interact with processes, files, and system calls.

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🚀 Features

• Real‑time Metrics – CPU, GPU temperature, memory usage, and network throughput updated every seconds.
• Process Management – List all processes, search/filter, kill, suspend/resume, and trace syscalls of any PID.
• File‑Watcher – Detects file/create/modify/delete events across the filesystem and shows the originating process.
• Syscall Tracer – Live view of system calls (open, read, write, execve, connect, mmap, …) with colour‑coded categories.
• Seccomp Export – One‑click generation of a Docker‑compatible JSON seccomp policy containing all observed syscalls.
• Modern UI – Dark, glass‑morphism inspired QML interface with smooth animations, search bar, pause button and vertical scrollbar for stable scrolling.
• Exportable Logs – Capture syscall logs to a file for offline analysis.

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🛠️ Tech Stack

• Core Language: C++ 20
• Framework: Qt 6.8+ (QtQuick, QtQuickControls, QtQuickLayouts)
• UI: QML (Qt Quick) with custom components
• Build System: CMake
• Platform: Linux (uses /proc, /sys, and ptrace APIs)

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📂 Project Structure

SmartPersonalDashboard/
├─ Backend/                # C++ services
│   ├─ metricsservice.h/cpp   # System metrics collection
│   ├─ FileWatcherService.h/cpp# File event monitoring
│   ├─ SyscallTracerService.h/cpp # Ptrace worker, decoding, seccomp export
│   └─ SyscallTable.h          # Syscall number → name/category mapping
├─ UI/                     # QML UI components
│   ├─ CenterComponent.qml   # Main dashboard (process list, search, pause)
│   ├─ FileWatcherTab.qml    # File‑watcher UI tab
│   └─ SyscallTracerTab.qml  # Syscall tracer UI tab
├─ Main.qml                # Root QML file – TabBar & StackLayout
├─ main.cpp                # Application entry point & service registration
├─ CMakeLists.txt          # Build configuration
└─ README.md               # Documentation (this file)

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📦 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Qt 6.8 or newer (including QtQuick modules)
• CMake ≥ 3.16
• A C++20‑compatible compiler (GCC ≥ 10 or Clang ≥ 12)
• Linux kernel with /proc and /sys access (required for metrics & ptrace)

Build Instructions

# 1️⃣ Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/yourusername/SmartPersonalDashboard.git
cd SmartPersonalDashboard

# 2️⃣ Create a build directory
mkdir build && cd build

# 3️⃣ Configure with CMake
cmake ..

# 4️⃣ Compile
cmake --build . --parallel

The executable will be created at ./build/appSmartPersonalDashboard.

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▶️ Running the Application

# Normal run (no root required)
./build/appSmartPersonalDashboard

Command‑line tracing shortcut

You can launch and automatically trace a binary directly from the command line:

./build/appSmartPersonalDashboard --trace /bin/ls --trace-args "-la"

The app starts headlessly (-platform offscreen) and prints syscall logs to syscall_trace.log.

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🔧 Using the Dashboard

1. Process List (Top Processes)

• Search bar – type a PID or process name to filter.
• Pause button – freeze live updates while you scroll.
• Actions per row:
  • Kill – send SIGKILL.
  • Stop / Run – suspend (SIGSTOP) or resume (SIGCONT).
  • Trace – open the Syscall Tracer tab and attach to that PID.

2. File‑Watcher Tab

• Shows file events (READ, WRITE, CREATE, DELETE).
• Each entry includes the originating PID, process name, and file path.
• Useful for debugging background daemons or watching a download folder.

3. Syscall Tracer Tab

• Launch & Trace – provide a binary path and args, the dashboard forks and traces the child.
• Attach to PID – enter an existing PID and click Attach.
• Export Seccomp – press the button to generate seccomp‑policy.json containing every unique syscall observed during the session.
• Colour‑coding (by category):
  • file – cyan #00ccff
  • network – orange #ffa500
  • process – green #00ff00
  • memory – purple #c71585
  • signal – blue #1e90ff
  • other – grey #aaaaaa

Security note – attaching to arbitrary processes

Linux’s Yama security module restricts ptrace when /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope is set to 1 (the default on many distros). In that mode only a parent may attach to its child.

• Option A – Temporary lift:

  sudo sysctl -w kernel.yama.ptrace_scope=0   # disables the restriction until reboot

• Option B – Run as root:

  sudo ./build/appSmartPersonalDashboard

• Option C – UI helper (future work): a button that runs the above command after user confirmation.

After the restriction is relaxed, the Attach field works for any user‑owned process.

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📂 Exported Files

• syscall_trace.log – raw log of captured syscalls (generated by the CLI trace mode).
• seccomp-policy.json – Docker‑compatible seccomp profile (exported from the tracer UI).

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🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.

Development guidelines

1. Follow the existing coding style (C++20, Qt signal/slot conventions, QML idioms).
2. Keep UI elements responsive – avoid long‑running work on the GUI thread.
3. Add unit tests for new C++ logic where appropriate.
4. Update this README when you add new features.

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📜 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License – see the LICENSE file for details.

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📞 Contact

For questions or suggestions, open an issue on GitHub or contact the maintainer at harshittext@gmail.com.