How to get CPU usage

Check out this package http://github.com/c9s/goprocinfo, goprocinfo package does the parsing stuff for you.

stat, err := linuxproc.ReadStat("/proc/stat")
if err != nil {
    t.Fatal("stat read fail")
}

for _, s := range stat.CPUStats {
    // s.User
    // s.Nice
    // s.System
    // s.Idle
    // s.IOWait
}

I had a similar issue and never found a lightweight implementation. Here is a slimmed down version of my solution that answers your specific question. I sample the /proc/stat file just like tylerl recommends. You'll notice that I wait 3 seconds between samples to match top's output, but I have also had good results with 1 or 2 seconds. I run similar code in a loop within a go routine, then I access the cpu usage when I need it from other go routines.

You can also parse the output of top -n1 | grep -i cpu to get the cpu usage, but it only samples for half a second on my linux box and it was way off during heavy load. Regular top seemed to match very closely when I synchronized it and the following program:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "io/ioutil"
    "strconv"
    "strings"
    "time"
)

func getCPUSample() (idle, total uint64) {
    contents, err := ioutil.ReadFile("/proc/stat")
    if err != nil {
        return
    }
    lines := strings.Split(string(contents), "\n")
    for _, line := range(lines) {
        fields := strings.Fields(line)
        if fields[0] == "cpu" {
            numFields := len(fields)
            for i := 1; i < numFields; i++ {
                val, err := strconv.ParseUint(fields[i], 10, 64)
                if err != nil {
                    fmt.Println("Error: ", i, fields[i], err)
                }
                total += val // tally up all the numbers to get total ticks
                if i == 4 {  // idle is the 5th field in the cpu line
                    idle = val
                }
            }
            return
        }
    }
    return
}

func main() {
    idle0, total0 := getCPUSample()
    time.Sleep(3 * time.Second)
    idle1, total1 := getCPUSample()

    idleTicks := float64(idle1 - idle0)
    totalTicks := float64(total1 - total0)
    cpuUsage := 100 * (totalTicks - idleTicks) / totalTicks

    fmt.Printf("CPU usage is %f%% [busy: %f, total: %f]\n", cpuUsage, totalTicks-idleTicks, totalTicks)
}

It seems like I'm allowed to link to the full implementation that I wrote on bitbucket; if it's not, feel free to delete this. It only works on linux so far, though: systemstat.go