Bashtop – future of the terminal Linux monitoring

Although the idea of the original top utility is follewed in many similar utilities for terminal based Linux monitoring, till now I’ve been using Htop, atop (which can monitor GPU on top of CPU/Mem/Net/Disk) and Nmon to do a job (later one, called „Topas on steroids” is ported from AIX to Linux).

Quite recently I’ve discovered Bashtop utility – terminal based utility for real time monitoring of the Linux systems.

At the first glance I thought It’s just another one top like utility among hunderds of similar utilities already available for a long time.

Still, this one is quite special, and on the following screens you’ll see why.

Bashtop is created in bash which is a certanly good news since bash is present on all modern Linux systems.

On the other side, one of the rerquirements is to have installed bash version 4.4 or higher, which means that if you are running RHEL/CentOS 8 you are fine, otherwise (RHEL7/CentOS 7) you’ll have to upgrade bash by using one of the many links, like this one:

https://computingforgeeks.com/how-to-install-bash-5-on-centos-linux/

Additional requirements for RHEL 8/CentOS8 are to enable epel-release and PowerTools repos.

sudo dnf install -y epel-release
sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled PowerTools

In case of RHEL 7/CentOS 7 you need to perform the folowing tasks:

sudo yum -y install git
git clone https://github.com/aristocratos/bashtop.git
cd bashtop
sudo make install

sudo yum -y install git
git clone https://github.com/aristocratos/bashtop.git
cd bashtop
sudo make install

You can find more details on the original project page find here:

https://github.com/aristocratos/bashtop

Below is the main screen where you can see why Bashtop is so cool (it’s hard to believe it’s written in bash).

On top of the screen you can observe CPU usage. When collor is green – CPU is fine.

When it start to get red, you should take a look at what is eating your CPU.

On the top right side you can check all essential parameters such as load average, total CPU load or by cores / threads, frequency and temperature.

On the middle-left part of the screen you can check memory and disk statistics shown in a clear way so that even novices on the Linux can easily interpret it.

On the bottom left sode you can check the network statistics, also shown in a clear to understand way.

Lastly, on the central-right part of the screen you can see all the information about running processes.

You can sort running processes, expand them in a tree view, get detail information about the individual process

 

filter it

or terminate the process.

 

On the cons, since bash 4.4 is required , this wonderful utility will probably get more traction with RHEL8/CentOS.

 

For those already in the Cloud where Ubuntu servers dominate, you can use it strait away.

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