In Operation
The image below shows some of the features of ttop. Let’s take a look at some of the interesting bits by clicking the image.
ttop is more than just a replacement for top. There’s lots of additional functionality. For example, the interface shows both CPU and disk temperature monitoring which are shown on the far right hand side near the top of the image. This information is obtained from sysfs. There’s network traffic information too.
Another interesting feature of ttop is its interface with critical values highlighted. You can see the CPU usage for process 3824 is shown in red, as its consuming a lot of CPU (note that this information needs to be taken into context with the frequency that the cores are running at).
You’ll also notice that on the far right hand side below the CPU graph there’s a green LIVE message. The software supports historical snapshots via systemd.timer or crontab. We can scroll through this historical data.
What else is there? ttop offers external triggers. A trigger is any external script or command which receives text from ttop into stdin.
There are advanced search filters, Docker-related information, a threads tree, sorting by CPU, memory, IO, and more.
Summary
ttop is a useful utility that lets you monitor a lot more information than the venerable top. It has a familiar top-like TUI.
ttop’s ability to save historical snapshots is a useful feature. It collects every 10 minutes by default, but this can be changed by running ttop with the option --on (number). It’s also possible to disable the collector.
For other similar software, check our our recommended free and open source alternatives to top.
Website: github.com/inv2004/ttop
Support:
Developer: inv2004
License: MIT License
ttop is written in Nim. Learn Nim with our recommended free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary