System monitor

They are also used to display items such as free space on one or more hard drives, the temperature of the CPU and other important components,[3] and networking information including the system IP address and current rates of upload and download.

Other possible displays may include the date and time, system uptime, computer name, username, hard drive S.M.A.R.T.

[7] System monitoring software like SpeedFan on Windows, lm_sensors on Linux, envstat on NetBSD, and sysctl hw.sensors on OpenBSD and DragonFly can interface with these chips to relay this environmental sensor information to the user.

[6]: p.114  Privacy becomes an issue when someone other than the end-user, such as a system manager,[6]: p.115  has legitimate need to access data about other users.

A further consideration is that a bug in this domain can have severe impact: an extreme case would "cause the OS to crash".