Gotop, the tool that lets you monitor your system’s activity

Monitoring the activity of our Linux system can be very useful in case we notice any kind of problem. To do this you could use tools such as gtop or vtop, but today we want to talk about another alternative that is becoming more and more popular due to the large amount of information it can provide. This is Gotop, a tool that monitors the system and is inspired by the two previously mentioned applications, with the difference that it has been written using Go.

It is a command line tool that will allow us to use the mouse to click on its sections, as well as being able to use keyboard shortcuts to work with it. Through Gotop we will be able to see the CPU usage history, the network usage through colour graphics, the disk usage or the temperature, among other factors. All of this showing their current values, which will allow us to make comparisons.

Features of Gotop

Among the most notable features of Gotop are the following:

• Allows the use of different colour schemes when displaying information.
• Allows you to delete a process or sort the list of processes by CPU or memory usage, although it does not allow you to filter a specific process.
• It is possible to scale the CPU and memory graphs by using the ‘h’ key to zoom in and the ‘I’ key to zoom out.
• The tool can display temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius.
• It can be configured to display only CPU, memory and process widgets.
• It offers the possibility to set the polling rate for CPU and memory.

Once Gotop is running, it is possible to press the ‘c’ key to sort the process table by CPU usage. It is also possible to press ‘m’ to sort the process table by the amount of memory in use. In the case of pressing ‘p’, it will be sorted by PID.

To filter processes by name (i.e., so that you can find a specific process), press ‘/’ and then start typing the name of the process you are looking to find as you type. process name. You can scale the CPU usage graph by pressing h and l respectively.

For example, you can get much more information by running:

gotop -l kitchensink

You can download the latest version of Gotop from GitHub. It is free, open source software that is available for most Unix-based systems, not just Linux.