Created/maintained by Gerlof Langeveld gerlof.langeveld@atoptool.nl
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, etcetera. 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:
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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.
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Utilization of all relevant resources. 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.
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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.
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Highlight critical resources. It highlights resources that have (almost) reached a critical load by using colors for the system statistics.
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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.
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Resource consumption by individual threads. It is able to show the resource consumption for each thread within a process.
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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.
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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).
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Accumulated process activity per user. For each interval, it is able to accumulate the resource consumption for all processes per user.
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Accumulated process activity per program. For each interval, it is able to accumulate the resource consumption for all processes with the same name.
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Accumulated process activity per container. For each interval, it is able to accumulate the resource consumption for all processes within the same container.
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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.