5 of my favorite Linux system-monitoring tools – and why I use them

ZDNET’s key takeaways

• System performance is key to getting the most out of Linux.
• There are several command line and GUI tools to make this task easy.
• Here you’ll learn about htop, glances, Mission Center, and more apps. 

Linux users are notorious for wanting to know as much information as they can about their systems and how they run. There are even apps and widgets (such as Conky) that can be installed and configured to display such information right on the desktop.

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If you want to monitor system performance on your Linux desktop, what apps should you use? Well, there are several, but not all of them are created equal. There are GUI apps and command-line apps, each of which has its pros and cons. I’m going to introduce you to the apps I prefer for this task — some GUI, some command-line based.

1. htop

For the longest time, top was my tool of choice. Eventually, however, I realized that top could be a bit frustrating to use and didn’t include features like color or mouse interaction. For those features, I turn to htop, which is one of the best command-line–based system monitoring tools for Linux. 

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With htop, you can kill and filter processes, view processes in a tree view, view memory and CPU usage, sort processes by CPU usage, view tasks, system load averages and even uptime. One very handy feature is the ability to kill processes within the htop interface. You can view the process with a command like htop -p 1234, select the listed process and then press F9 to kill it.

The htop tool is free to use and can be installed via your distribution’s standard repositories.

2. Glances

Glances is a very popular terminal-based Linux system monitor that offers a few extra bits over htop, such as container monitoring, logged-in users, temperature monitors, voltages and fan speeds. Even though Glances presents a ton of information, it’s laid out in a dashboard that makes it fairly easy to read. 

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One superpower Glances includes is the ability to monitor remote systems, so if you have other Linux machines on your LAN that you want to keep tabs on, you can do that from the convenience of your desktop. You can also run Glances in specific modes, such as web server, client/server and even in a WebUI mode, where you can view Glances via a web browser (glances -w and then point your browser to the URL in the output).

Glances is free to install via the standard repositories or Snap.

It’s time to get to the GUIs.

3. Mission Center

Mission Center is a relatively new system monitor GUI app, and it very quickly rose to prominence. In fact, Mission Center became my default tool for monitoring system performance. With Mission Center, you can monitor in real time CPU, memory, disk and network; view process resource usage; and stop or force-stop applications. 

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You can also configure update speeds, handle process state merging and have the app remember your sorting. Although Mission Center doesn’t include a cornucopia of features, its UI is well-designed and user-friendly enough that anyone can work with this tool. The only drawback is that it’s available for free only via Flatpak.

4. GNOME System Monitor

GNOME System Monitor is another outstanding GUI that makes monitoring your system a breeze. With this well-designed interface, you can view processes, resources, file systems, active processes, user processes, dependencies and CPU, I/O, memory, disk reads and writes and priorities. You can customize the update interval, stop, end or kill processes, view memory maps, view files that have been opened by a process, change the priority of a process and more. 

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The resource page is the highlight, as it gives you an at-a-glance look at every CPU core, memory and swap and network usage… all in a well-laid-out GUI. GNOME System Monitor comes preinstalled on most desktop distributions that use the GNOME environment.

5. KDE System Monitor

System Monitor is the KDE Plasma take on the tool and, if I’m being honest, it has a superior GUI. For example, instead of right-clicking a process and then selecting to kill or end it, you can simply select a process and click the End Process button. Then there’s the Applications tab, which shows you running applications and the History tab, which gives you real-time data on CPU, GPU, memory and network usage. The Process tab picks up where the Applications tab leaves off. Right-click a process and you can either quickly end it or send a specific signal to it (such as STOP, CONT, HUP, INT and more). 

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You can also view processes in list or tree mode. Tree mode makes it possible to see what child processes belong to a parent, because if you unwittingly kill a parent process, you could also kill its child processes. KDE System Monitor comes preinstalled with the KDE Plasma desktop, so there’s no need to manually install it.

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