Windows-like Resource Monitor for macOS

[Marc Hoffman]

I would like to suggest an addition to the Parallels Toolbox. What would be very useful is a macOS activity monitor utility similar to Windows' "Resource Monitor." Windows Resource Monitor allows a user to no only inspect what is using resource on the system (e.g., disk activity), but it also allows for refinement for drilling down to see what processes are using what resources.

For example:

Let's say that disk activity is elevated. With the current macOS Activity Monitor, I can't see what process(es) is monopolizing the disk. I can't even pull up delta disk activity. If we had something like Activity Monitor, I could not only see what process was using the disk, I could actually click the process to filter out all other processes. I could also tell what file or files the process was touching on the disk.

 

[Gregg_Wonderly]

You can see busy processes with "top" from the Mac terminal window. You can sort by high memory, high disk etc using keystrokes (look at the man page with "man top" from the terminal command line). Additionally, you can inspect process open files/sockets etc with the 'lsof' (ls open files) command from the terminal prompt. There are several other details available to you, depending on what you need. MacOSX is Unix. You can search for "how do I ... in unix" or "how do I ... in linux" and get reasonable answers to know what commands or programs provide you the details you need.

 

[Marc Hoffman]

Thank you for your reply. I've already seen many of these suggestions using the command line. However, none of them appears to do what I am after.

The following image attachments show how to use Resource Monitor in Windows to use check boxes to filter items/processes that the command line doesn't really seem to offer (or present cleanly). Please see the image descriptions listed here that correspond to the image attachments.

01_processes_all.png - This screenshot shows all processes with disk activity on the host. The top pane shows these processes sorted by total bytes/second. The bottom pane shows what files each process is accessing sorted by disk writes bytes/second.

02_retrospect.png - This screenshot shows the process retrospect.exe's disk access. In the top pane, Retrospect is checked. The processes are sorted by total bytes/sec. The bottom pane shows only Retrospect.exe's file access. It shows what files are being touched by the Retrospect.exe process. It is sorted by disk writes in bytes/second.

03_retrospect_system.png - This screenshot shows the disk activity of two processes: retrospect.exe and system. The top pane is once again sorted by total bytes/second. The bottom pane shows disk access for the Retrospect.exe and system processes. This time, I've changed the sorting to show total bytes/second.

The command line may be able to do this on macOS (I'd love to see how, as it still escapes me, though). But even if the command line can do this, (and yes, I'm going to mention the dreaded "GUI" term ) I think a graphical user interface with interactivity lends a better display and presentation of the data.