Top Top-Like Tools
The Tops
One of the first lessons I learned when I became an admin was that you don't always have a nice GUI console to servers, particularly if the server is misbehaving (i.e., not acting normally). Problems that crop up usually mean no X Window system or any other sort of GUI access to the server. Often, this also means that monitoring tools such as Ganglia [1] aren't giving you much or any information.
Typically, you can only manage either a simple SSH login or maybe a crash cart connected to the server, or maybe a KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) connection to the server. Moreover, most of the time in the HPC world, the compute nodes don't have a graphics card suitable for running a GUI. Therefore, you are left with a simple ASCII terminal window.
What tools can help you? Fortunately, Linux and other *nix operating systems come with some command-line tools that can help you diagnose the problems.
Interestingly, these common *nix tools have spawned the development of similar tools with added capability or slightly different features. Although the original *nix tools are really useful, many of these lookalike tools are outstanding.
If I only have terminal access to a misbehaving server, either through an SSH login or maybe a crash cart plugged into the server, the first thing I do is to run the command top. In this article I want to cover what Top does and what other Top-like tools are available. Some of these tools may be familiar and some may be new, but I've found them to be very useful and sometimes wildly creative.
top
When I get a login to the server, the first tool I run is Top, because I get a quick summary of the status of the system. Let me explain with an example. Figure 1 is a screen shot of my desktop when I was running Python code
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