Top 10 Linux System Monitoring Tools For Every Linux User

Today, we are going to talk about various Linux system monitoring tools for system administrators. Some of the tools/commands comes pre-installed while some of the tools mentioned below need to be installed.

Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know:

1. top:

top is a process activity monitoring command for Linux. It gives you the real-time view of a running system.

Run the following command in Linux to execute the top command:

sudo top

2. vmstat:

The vmstat command lets you to know about processes, memory, traps,  paging, block IO, and cpu activity.

sudo vmstat

3. ps

Using ps command will help you to get a snapshot of the current processes. ps similar to top command it provides you the more information.

sudo ps

4. pmap

The pmap command in Linux displays the memory usage map of a process or multiple processes. Monitors the process memory usage on Linux. We need process id which we can get from ps or top command:

sudo pmap PID

5. netstat

netstat is a linux network and statistics monitoring tool. It is a built-in tool which is used to list out the TCP network connections, routing tables and a number of network interfaces in the system.

sudo netstat

6. iptraf

iptraf command can be used to gather the real time network statistics on Linux system. You can easily figure out the TCP connection packet and byte count, TCP/UDP traffic breakdowns, interface statistics and activity indicators, and station packet and byte counts with this command.

sudo iptraf

7. iostat

This command is used for monitoring system input and system output. It helps to monitor Linux average CPU load and disk activity.

sudo iostat

8. sar

SAR or System Activity Report is a Unix System V-derived system monitor command which is used to check CPU activity, memory/paging, network, interrupts, device load and swap space utilization.

9. mpstat

It is used to Monitor multiprocessor usage on Linux.

sudo mpstat

10. tcpdump

tcpdump is a common packet analyzer. tcpdump allows the user to display TCP/IP and other packets which is  being transmitted or received over a network.

Bonus tools :

11. iotop

iotop is a Linux I/O monitoring tool. iotop tool is based on Python.

sudo iotop

12. htop

htop is a similar to top command. It is used to view the  interactive process. It is third party application.

sudo htop

13. atop

atop is an interactive monitor tool to view the load on your Linux system, i.e. cpu, memory, disk and network.

14. iftop

iftop is a real time network monitoring tool. It can be used to monitor the network bandwidth.

sudo iftop

15. nmon

nmon is short for Nigel’s performance Monitor for Linux on POWER. It displays and records local system information.

16. glances

glances is an open source cross-platform monitoring tool for Linux based operating systems. It is written in python. glances can be used to monitor CPU, Network Interfaces, Load Average, Memory, Disk I/O, Processes and many more.