Unlike other operating systems Linux is bundled with lot of System monitoring tools, by default which helps us to know the live status of the resources available in the Linux servers. This article briefly explains commonly used system monitoring tools available in most of the Linux flavors. System monitoring tools help us to find bottlenecks in system resources like Hard Disk, Memory, network and CPU. In this article I explained most of the commonly used system monitoring tools available in UNIX like operating systems.
# top
In most of the UNIX based operating systems top command used to list the current running processes which take more cpu. Output of this command has two parts Summary at the top and list of processes which takes more cpu usage below to the summary.
This command is more popular and of course useful for Linux System Administrators to know which user or which process takes more server resources.
# htop
This is also a real time system monitoring tool which is much easier to use than the traditional top command. Some of the extra features htop has which top doesn’t have are:
In ‘htop’ you can scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and complete command lines.
‘htop’ starts faster (‘top’ seems to collect data for a while before displaying anything).
In ‘htop’ you don’t need to type the process number to kill a process, in ‘top’ you do.
In ‘htop’ you don’t need to type the process number or the priority value to renice a process, in ‘top’ you do.
‘htop’ supports mouse operation, ‘top’ doesn’t
# vmstat
This command reports information about processes, memory, paging, block IO, traps, and cpu activity.
Commonly used options for vmstat
-a displays active/inactive memory
-f number of forks since last reboot
-m Display Memory Utilization Slabinfo
-s various event counters and memory statistics
-d reports disk statistics
-p <partition name> for detailed statistics
Read more: Varghees Samraj
# top
In most of the UNIX based operating systems top command used to list the current running processes which take more cpu. Output of this command has two parts Summary at the top and list of processes which takes more cpu usage below to the summary.
This command is more popular and of course useful for Linux System Administrators to know which user or which process takes more server resources.
# htop
This is also a real time system monitoring tool which is much easier to use than the traditional top command. Some of the extra features htop has which top doesn’t have are:
In ‘htop’ you can scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and complete command lines.
‘htop’ starts faster (‘top’ seems to collect data for a while before displaying anything).
In ‘htop’ you don’t need to type the process number to kill a process, in ‘top’ you do.
In ‘htop’ you don’t need to type the process number or the priority value to renice a process, in ‘top’ you do.
‘htop’ supports mouse operation, ‘top’ doesn’t
# vmstat
This command reports information about processes, memory, paging, block IO, traps, and cpu activity.
Commonly used options for vmstat
-a displays active/inactive memory
-f number of forks since last reboot
-m Display Memory Utilization Slabinfo
-s various event counters and memory statistics
-d reports disk statistics
-p <partition name> for detailed statistics
Read more: Varghees Samraj