The Linux kernel exposes a wealth of information through the proc special filesystem. It's not hard to find an encyclopedic reference about proc. In this article I'll take a different approach: we'll see how proc tricks can solve a number of real-world problems. All of these tricks should work on a recent Linux kernel, though some will fail on older systems like RHEL version 4.

pv - Pipe Viewer - is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion.

Graphical process explorer for Linux. Shows process information: process tree, TCP IP connections and graphical performance figures for processes. Aims to mimic Windows procexp from sysinternals, and aims to be more usable than top and ps.

God is an easy to configure, easy to extend monitoring framework written in Ruby.

Keeping your server processes and tasks running should be a simple part of your deployment process. God aims to be the simplest, most powerful monitoring application available.

Monit is a free open source utility for managing and monitoring, processes, files, directories and filesystems on a UNIX system. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and "what just happened to kill our performance?" problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.