In this section and the next, we'll work through monitoring system resources for problems, and then we'll even create a script to send us a handy message containing the results of our resources. This message is a handy monitoring tool.

Earlier in this chapter, the top command was mentioned briefly. The top command is one of the most useful commands to know, and simply typing top is enough for quite a few situations, to see what is currently happening on the system. The top command itself has a little bit more to it than just statically viewing resources. You can also change the sorting, view a single PID, or even kill a PID if you would like to do so.

When you first run the top command, the resources are sorted by the CPU percentage. This may be what you want if you were looking at finding out which process was consuming the largest amount of CPU. However, perhaps, you would like to sort the summary window by something else, such as memory consumption, should you...