[sciurus]

You can run atop without root, it just won't use process accounting so you may miss some processes (but so would htop and glances).

I'm not sure what being on a VM has to do with anything.

It would be nice if there was a way (e.g. a command-line argument or atoprc setting) to disable the ability to kill processes from within atop; then it would be safer for an admin to make it executable as root by regular users.

[clinth]

Apologies, I based my comment on atop's README:

    For interactive use it is sufficient to install ATOP with the command (as root):

        make install

I wouldn't have guessed the reference to root was optional! Thanks for the pointer.