Monitor System

ttop – system monitoring tool

The top utility needs little introduction to seasoned Linux users. top is a small utility that offers a dynamic real-time view of a running system. It allows users to monitor the processes that are running on a system.

top remains a useful utility. It helps with system administration by identifying users and processes that are hogging the system. It is also useful for non-system administrators, helping to track and kill errant processes. However, top is showing its age and there are a bunch of utilities that offer a more feature-laden and visually attractive alternative.

ttop is a system monitoring tool with historical snapshots and alerts. It has a top-like TUI. It’s written in Nim and published under an open source license.

Installation

ttop was tested with Ubuntu 23.10. There’s no package available in the Ubuntu repositories. The developer provides a static binary, but let’s build the software from source.

First, we will download and run a script that downloads the latest version of choosenim and initiates its installation. choosenim installs the Nim programming language from official downloads and sources.

$ curl https://nim-lang.org/choosenim/init.sh -sSf | sh

ttop installation

As instructed, I added export PATH=/home/sde/.nimble/bin:$PATH to my .bashrc.

Then either log out/in to the shell or run the command $ source ~/.bashrc.

The .bashrc file is read only once, when bash starts. After making a change to .bashrc, it isn’t applied until .bashrc is re-read. By running source .bashrc, you make exactly this – you tell bash to re-read that file.

Next, clone the project’s GitHub repository with the command:

$ git clone https://github.com/inv2004/ttop

Change into the newly created directory

$ cd ttop

And build the source code with the command:

$ nimble -:release build

For Arch and Arch-based distros, there’s a package in the Arch User Repository.

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Please read our FAQ before making a comment.

0 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments