The main reason would be system availability: in case of a system overload, you may have no physical or remote access to your instance.īy externalizing process monitoring, you can analyze what’s causing the outage without accessing the machine.Īnother reason is that processes get created and killed all the time, often by the kernel itself. Knowing that those two commands exist, why would we want to build yet another way to monitor processes?

Htop also provides gauges that reflects current system usage.

Htop provides the same set of functionalities (CPU, memory, uptime.) as top but in a colorful and pleasant way. The top command is already pretty readable, but there is a command that makes everything even more readable than that: htop. This command is widely used among sysadmins and is probably the first command run when a performance bottleneck is detected on a system (if you can access it of course!) Top provides a full overview of performance metrics on your system such as the current CPU usage, the current memory usage as well as metrics for individual processes. When it comes to process monitoring for Unix systems, you have multiple options.

Now that we have an overview of everything that we are going to learn, and without further due, let’s have an introduction on what’s currently existing for Unix systems.

Bonus : implementing ad-hoc filters to track individual processes or instances.

Build a complete Grafana dashboard including the latest panels available such as the ‘Gauge’ and the ‘Bar Gauge’.

Build a simple bash script that exports metrics to Pushgateway.

Learn how to install the latest versions of Prometheus v2.9.2, Pushgateway v0.8.0 and Grafana v6.2.

Understanding current state-of-the-art ways to monitor process performance on Unix systems.

Bonus : explore data using ad hoc filtersīefore jumping right into this technical journey, let’s have a quick look at everything that you are going to learn by reading this article:.

a – Retrieving the current overall CPU usage.

Building An Awesome Dashboard With Grafana.

Building a bash script to retrieve metrics.

Linux cpu usage by process