#Best system monitor for ubuntu how to#

It’s important to note that iotop requires root privileges or NET_ADMIN capability.Īlso, we have to check if the following kernel options are enabled: $ egrep '(CONFIG_VM_EVENT_COUNTERS|TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING|CONFIG_TASKSTATS|TASK_DELAY_ACCT)' /boot/config-$(uname -r)īy default, the iotop command displays a view of disk I/O by each process or thread: $ sudo iotop It’s an interactive tool that provides real-time disk activities by process or thread. The iotop command can help us do just that. For instance, it’s important to identify which process or thread is causing heavy I/O activities.

#Best system monitor for ubuntu how to#

We previously discussed how to check I/O activities, but sometimes that isn’t enough. If we only want to print information about the disks or partitions that are really active, skipping devices with zero metrics, we can add the -z option: Sda2 4.10 78.08 47.02 0.00 77550214 46701280 0īy default, the iostat command displays information about all block devices and partitions present in the system. We can also add the -p option to display statistics for block devices and all of their partitions: $ iostat -d -p sda

To repeat the iostat command, we can add an interval in second: $ iostat -d 2Īs we can see, iostat displays information about all device activities present in the system. It reports information about the CPU and disk device utilization.Īt this time, we’ll only focus on disk I/O activities therefore, we’ll use the -d option: $ iostat -d In this case, the iostat command is handy and easy to understand. To start, it’s interesting to get an overview of disk I/O activity.