comparison.md

Comparison with alternative tools

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Atop

https://www.atoptool.nl/

• Terminal interface
  • Supports sorting, scrolling
• In-depth host-level stats
• Built in support for persisting/replaying historical data
• atopsar for scriptable access to historical data

Drawbacks

• No cgroup awareness
• May suffer priority inversions while host is under resource contention
• On-disk data has custom delta compression and may be corrupted easily

cAdvisor

https://github.com/google/cadvisor

• Web interface
• REST API for access to current data
• Tight integration with containers and container runtimes (eg docker)
• Reports high level stats on containers
• Plugin architecture for persisting historical data

Drawbacks

• Requires external storage service to persist historical data
• cgroup1 only
• Limited support for host level stats
• No built in terminal interface

htop

https://htop.dev/

• Wonderful terminal interface
  • Supports searching, filtering, sorting, scrolling
• Process tree view
• Supports system actions (killing processes, straceing processes)

Drawbacks

• No support for persisting/replaying historical data
• No cgroup awareness
• Limited host-level stats

sysstat (sar)

https://github.com/sysstat/sysstat

• CLI-based tools like sar, iostat, pidstat, and others
• Collects a wide range of system performance metrics (CPU, memory, IO, etc.)
• Mature and widely used for historical performance tracking
• Data can be collected periodically via cron or systemd timers
• Data stored in a binary format, accessible through CLI

Drawbacks

• No interactive or web interface
• Lacks container or cgroup-specific visibility
• Requires parsing and scripting to extract structured data
• Binary logs are not human-readable without sar

collectd

https://collectd.org/

• Daemon-based metrics collector
• Plugin architecture for system and application metrics (disk, memory, network, etc.)
• Can push metrics to various backends (Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus via exporter)
• Lightweight and extensible with community plugins
• Suitable for long-term storage and visualization setups

Drawbacks

• No built-in UI or terminal interface
• Configuration can be complex
• Requires external tooling for data visualization
• No direct cgroup or container integration by default

below

https://github.com/facebookincubator/below

• Terminal interface
  • Supports filtering, zooming, pausing, sorting, scrolling
• Built in support for persisting/replaying historical data
• In-depth host-level stats
• cgroup awareness with cgroup tree view
• below dump for scriptable access to historical data
• Goes to great lengths to avoid priority inversions during host resource contention

Drawbacks

• cgroup2 only
• No built in data compression (recommends btrfs transparent compression)