Topnet: A Network-Aware Top(1)

System administrators regularly use the top utility for understanding the resource consumption of the processes running on UNIX computers. Top provides an accurate and real-time display of the computing and memory capacity of the system among the running processes, but it provides no information about the network traffic sent and received by the processes running on the system. Although the authors have seen a proliferation of network monitoring tools that help system administrators understand the traffic flowing through their networks, most of these tools have been designed for network deployment and cannot easily, if at all, provide real-time attribution of network resources to individual processes running on end hosts.