[d3Xt3r]

This. Not only that, I don't know of a single person (IRL or online) who used atop, like, ever. In fact, this is the first time I'm even hearing of atop.

IIRC, most folks went from top -> htop -> glances -> various btop variants (bashtop, bpytop, btop++ etc)

[__turbobrew__]

atop can record to a file and then be replayed in the future. Sometimes a node is so FUBARed that it won’t even emit metrics so atop can sometimes save your ass when it records metrics to disk.

[davesmylie]

this - I use atop heavily in my fleet for exactly this reason. It's really helped nail some otherwise hard to find root causes.

[radicality]

I used atop sporadically at Facebook to debug performance issues. I actually learned about it there, was I think on all the machines. This was bunch of years ago, so not sure if it still is there fleetwide, but it was really helpful to get a past granular view of what happened on the machine on some exact second few days ago where error rate metrics indicate a particular host was struggling.

[SubiculumCode]

Btop variants, glances, why should I move from htop?

[haswell]

I’d summarize btop++ as: a much richer and more flexible experience with a very pleasing UI.

Screenshots summarize this better than I can [0].

- [0] https://github.com/aristocratos/btop?tab=readme-ov-file#scre...

[refulgentis]

Why should I move on from top? (serious question)

I'm genuinely stunned to figure out there's a whole set of lore of *tops.

I'm not sure I'm being rational from a textbook security perspective, but, it'd take a whole lot of tangible reward to get me off the binaries supplied with the system.

[do_not_redeem]

btop gives you a more holistic overview of the system: individual disk stats, network stats, graphs of mem/cpu/bandwidth usage over time, etc.

I think it's handy having everything on one screen, but if you know your way around all the individual builtin tools for these, more power to you, no reason to change.

[d3Xt3r]

First of all, btop is included in the default repos of most Linux distros, so you don't need to worry about security. This also applies to htop and glances by the way.

In terms of tangible feature benefits, btop also offers disk I/O stats, network throughput stats, partition usage, and even GPU usage (if your distro compiled it with GPU support).

In terms of "nice" stuff that's non-essential, the overall UI is a lot more user-friendly and in many ways, better (subjectively). Eg there are visual graphs for various metrics, you can filter process names by substring, get detailed stats of a specific process, see the tree view of all the processes, easily show/hide various parts of the UI (eg you can focus solely on the process list if that's the only thing you're interested in).

There are also some distinct advantages the UI offers easier to send specific signals to processes. Eg in btop I can just select SIGSTOP from the menu, whereas in top, I'd need to remember or lookup the numeric equivalent (eg 19 for SIGSTOP).

Other top alternatives also offer similar feature sets. Glances also shows the most recent warning/errors from the system logs), as well as container resource usage which would be handy for some folks.