Atop Linux Command

GEEKS !!

Posting tip after long. hmmm !!

So you are on top of the world, after learning the “top” command. I know, you know that simple top command that you have learned during your RHCSA Training or RHCE Training.

Lets take a glance at “atop” command. Its a beautiful and more versatile command that gives you what “top” used to give you and more.

As per atop manual pages -

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.

But the BEST part is what I like is “atop” shows you the critical resource in “color” (red) when it is reaching its max.

The default CRITICAL values are: 

Processor – 90% or higher.

Disk – 70% or higher.

Network – 90% or higher.

Memory – 90% is considered ‘critical’.

Swap – 80% is considered ‘critical’.

These default values can be modified in the configuration file. You are really encouraged to read the man pages of atop to configure it, tune it and even redirect the output to a file for latter processing, like in sar or iostat.

Then you are free to use utilities like GNUPLOT to plot it in a graphical manner. You can also use OPEN-OFFICE for that job.

Here is the atop from my machine.

atop Linux Command