T his little utility was initially designed to fix the problem of a missing system resource monitor in Elementary OS. Even though you could always use command-line tools such as top/htop, there was no dedicated graphical tool for the job. Thanks to Monitor, you now have a much better insight into resource usage, CPU load and other related metrics. Sure, the software isn’t unique – we already have Gnome System Monitor – and at first glance Monitor seems like just another GTK-based program with the same feature set, but that’s not quite true. Monitor has a substantially different look and feel, which changes the way we view system resource use.
Monitor has two main tabs: one for system processes and another for resources usage. When exploring the processes list, you can sort them by name, PID number, CPU or memory usage, and thus quickly track down the required string out of the usually long list of suspects. However, you can also instantly see which files have been opened by a particular process. In Monitor, you don’t need to open a process properties window or do anything else to see its files – all the relevant data is always at hand.