atop for server monitoring

The program atop is an interactive monitor to view the load on a Linux system.  It shows the occupation of the most critical hardware resources (from a performance point of view) on system level, i.e. cpu, memory, disk and network.

It also shows which processes are responsible for the indicated load with respect to cpu- and memory load on process level. Disk load is shown if per  process  “storage accounting” is active in the kernel or if the kernel patch âcntâ has been installed.

Network load is only shown per process if the kernel patch âcntâ has been installed. Every interval (default: 10 seconds) information is shown about the resource occupation on system level (cpu, memory, disks  and  network  lay-ers),  followed  by a list of processes which have been active during the last interval (note that all processes that were unchanged during the last interval are not shown, unless the key âaâ has been pressed).

If the list of active processes does not entirely fit on the  screen,  only the top of the list is shown (sorted in order of activity). The intervals are repeated till the number of samples (specified as command argument) is reached, or till the key âqâ is pressed in interactive mode.

# yum insall atop

# atop