Is there a way to run top as a daemon to gather historical process data?

Question

I am aware that I can write a cron job that will run top in batch mode and write the output to a file but I am looking for something more elegant than that. Also I am aware of sysstat (sar) but I am looking for more detailed process data.

Does something like this exist?

What about running periodically `ps`? This command seems to be much more suitable for what you plan. — wazoox, Feb 23 '12 at 16:37
If a snapshot of running processes once in a while is what you're looking for, you could run `ps -ef >> logfile` from cron. — wazoox, Feb 24 '12 at 17:50

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 23 '12 at 16:41

2

Look into atop, which runs a daemon and keeps historical data for every process. You made need to do some tweaking to keep an archive, but that's my other tool of choice besides sar.

answered Feb 23 '12 at 16:41

Jeff Ferland

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Is there a way to run top as a daemon to gather historical process data?

1 Answers1