GUIDE: Monitor any process in real-time with Netdata

Netdata is more than a multitude of generic system-level metrics and visualizations. Instead of providing only a bird’s eye view of your system, leaving you to wonder exactly what is taking up 99% CPU, Netdata also gives you visibility into every layer of your node. These additional layers give you context, and meaningful insights, into the true health and performance of your infrastructure.

One of these layers is the process . Every time a Linux system runs a program, it creates an independent process that executes the program’s instructions in parallel with anything else happening on the system. Linux systems track the state and resource utilization of processes using the /proc filesystem, and Netdata is designed to hook into those metrics to create meaningul visualizations out of the box.

While there are a lot of existing command-line tools for tracking processes on Linux systems, such as ps or top , only Netdata provides dozens of real-time charts, at both per-second and event frequency, without you having to write SQL queries or know a bunch of arbitrary command-line flags.

With Netdata’s process monitoring, you can:

  • Benchmark/optimize performance of standard applications, like web servers or databases
  • Benchmark/optimize performance of custom applications
  • Troubleshoot CPU/memory/disk utilization issues (why is my system’s CPU spiking right now?)
  • Perform granular capacity planning based on the specific needs of your infrastructure
  • Search for leaking file descriptors
  • Investigate zombie processes

… and much more. Let’s get started.