System Monitoring is one of the key factor to keep an eye on what’s really happening behind the scenes in your operating system. People who are very much interested in the system performance and optimization often tend to check the resource usage of various applications, components and other system related processes.

There are many ways to monitor these processes. On a personal computer running Linux with GUI environment, there are quite a lot of apps and programs tailored exactly to do this job. Many Linux distributions will have one inbuilt as well. But there are few scenarios where you wont be able to get the luxury of GUI, so you will entirely have to depend on CLI or the Command Line Interface. SSH is one good example for this, where you can connect to remote computer and operate it with commands.

Monitoring Process with CLI.

It’s really simple. Just type the command in the terminal:

top

This will bring up a list of all the processes that are running in your linux. If you want advanced options, type ‘h’  to get help. And to exit, press ‘q’.

You may find this ‘top’ system monitor tool quite difficult to use in the beginning. And also it lacks some advanced features. So if you want something bit shiny, well detailed and easy to use, you must then use the command:

htop

Not all the linux operating systems bundle this tool. So you will have to install it. If you are on Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install htop

You can use these commands on your SSH as well. These two will give you the insight of CPU usage, RAM usage and process status. Hope you find this small tutorial helpful.