4 Linux Monitoring Tools You Should Use

See what is really going on underneath the hood with these tools

Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash.

If you don’t know what is happening within the underlying operating system of your servers, you’re flying blind. You can make educated guesses, but when it comes down to it, you need raw data — and you need it quickly.

In order to make informed decisions on changes to your system, you need to be able to pinpoint issues and examine clear data.

Have you ever noticed a machine behaving sluggishly, but CPU usage doesn’t seem very high? Have you discovered extremely high network utilization on a system but don’t know the offending process?

These tools can help. The best part is most of them can be used without a GUI and are installed easily on most servers.

Below are some of the best monitoring tools for Linux I use on a daily basis to help me diagnose issues quickly and accurately.

1. iotop

Who is using I/O and how much in iotop.

If you’ve ever wondered how much of your precious I/O is being used up by certain processes, iotop to the rescue! I’ve used this countless times to watch…