Process Monitor¶

The process probe monitors the local process table, reporting per-process CPU utilization, memory usage, thread count, open file descriptors and uptime. An optional aggregate metric rolls up counts across processes sharing the same name. Equivalent to PRTG's "Top Processes" sensor.

Quick start¶

probes:
  - name: process
    type: process

Monitors all processes by default. Add a filter block to narrow the scope.

Parameters¶

Parameter	Default	Description
`filter.by_name`	—	Regex pattern to restrict monitoring to matching process names
`filter.by_user`	—	Restrict to processes owned by this OS user
`filter.top_n`	—	Keep only the N processes with highest CPU utilization
`aggregate.enabled`	`true`	Emit an additional rolled-up count per distinct process name

Metrics¶

Metric	Unit	Description
`process.cpu.utilization`	1	CPU utilization ratio (0–1) per process, tagged with `process.name` / `process.pid`
`process.memory.physical_usage`	By	Resident set size (physical memory) per process
`process.memory.virtual_usage`	By	Virtual memory size per process
`process.threads`	{thread}	Thread count per process
`process.open_file_descriptors`	{fd}	Open file descriptors (Linux only)
`process.uptime`	s	Seconds since the process started
`process.count`	{process}	Aggregate process count per name (when `aggregate.enabled: true`)

Operational notes¶

On Linux, the probe reads from /proc. Root privilege is required only if monitoring processes owned by other users.
process.open_file_descriptors is Linux-only; not emitted on Windows.
filter.top_n is applied after all other filters. It is useful for "monitor the 5 most CPU-hungry processes" scenarios.