Mac System Monitoring Tools

Monitor processes, hardware sensors and infrastructure metrics from macOS.

Built-in monitors are a good first step; third-party tools add menu-bar convenience and infrastructure-wide dashboards.

Local Monitoring

See what's happening on this Mac right now.

Activity MonitorBuilt into macOS
See what's using CPU, memory, energy, disk and network, and force-quit unresponsive apps.
Open:Activity Monitor (in Applications > Utilities, or Spotlight)
All versions of macOSApple documentation
topBuilt into macOS
See live CPU and memory use per process from the terminal.
Terminal:top
All versions of macOSApple documentation
htop
An interactive process viewer.
Open SourceMac / Linux
btop
A resource monitor with a detailed terminal interface.
Open SourceMac / Linux

Infrastructure Monitoring

Monitor many machines over time.

Grafana
Dashboards and visualisation for metrics and logs.
Open SourceWin / Mac / Linux

More macOS tools