Atop is an ASCII full-screen performance monitor for Linux that is capable of
reporting the activity of all processes (even if processes have finished
during the interval), daily logging of system and process activity for
long-term analysis, highlighting overloaded system resources by using
colors, etc.
At regular intervals, it shows system-level activity related to the CPU,
memory, swap, disks (including LVM) and network layers,
and for every process (and thread) it shows e.g. the CPU utilization,
memory growth, disk utilization, priority, username, state, and exit code.
In combination with the optional kernel module
netatop, it even shows network
activity per process/thread.
The command atop has some major advantages compared
to other performance monitoring tools:
- Resource consumption by all processes
It shows the resource consumption by all processes
that were active during the interval,
so also the resource consumption
by those processes that have finished during the interval.
- Utilization of all relevant resources — by text or bar graph
Obviously it shows system-level counters concerning utilization of
cpu and memory/swap, however it also shows disk I/O and network
utilization counters on system level.
The utilization can be shown as (character-based) bar graphs or
(more detailed) by plain text.
- Permanent logging of resource utilization
It is able to store raw counters in a file for
long-term analysis on system level and process level. These raw
counters are compressed at the moment of writing to minimize
disk space usage.
By default, the daily logfiles are preserved for 28 days.
System activity reports can be generated from a logfile by
using the atopsar command.
- Highlight critical resources
It highlights resources that have (almost) reached a
critical load by using colors for the system statistics.
- Scalable window width
It is able to add or remove columns dynamically at the moment
that you enlarge or shrink the width of your window.
- Resource consumption by individual threads
It is able to show the resource consumption for each thread within
a process.
- Watch activity only
By default, it only shows system resources and processes that were
really active during the last interval, so
output related to resources or processes that were completely
passive during the interval is by default suppressed.
- Watch deviations only
For the active system resources and processes, only the load
during the last interval is shown (not the accumulated utilization
since system boot or process startup).
- Accumulated process activity per user
For each interval, it is able to accumulate the resource
consumption for all processes per user.
- Accumulated process activity per program
For each interval, it is able to accumulate the resource
consumption for all processes with the same name.
- Network activity per process
In combination with the optional kernel module
netatop,
it shows process-level counters concerning the number of
TCP and UDP packets transferred, and the consumed
network bandwidth per process.