When running a simple top command, you notice that while running nothing else, the User role may consume 7% of the droplet. Idle fluctuates between 92%-88%. However, when looking at the DigitalOcean dashboard I noticed that during those same instances, the droplet’s ‘CPU Usage’ statistic barely reached 1%.
I’m curious about the ‘CPU Usage’ stat in general. If an idle reading is 0% while the DigitalOcean ‘CPU Usage’ stat shows maybe 1%- does that mean that 100% of the CPU was dedicated to a task at that moment, but during that moment the CPU itself was only taxed at 1% of its total capability??
Trying to wrap my head around monitoring and system health. Thank you!!
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.
Become a contributor for community
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
DigitalOcean Documentation
Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.
Resources for startups and SMBs
The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.
The developer cloud
Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.
Get started for free
Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*
*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.
Hi there,
Idle means that the CPU is not doing any work, for example, if the CPU is Idle at 95% then the usage is actually 5%.
I could suggest running the
htopcommand on your server as you will get a better visual representation of the CPU utilization.The
topcommand shows you the load average of your CPUs. For example, roughly speaking, if you have 1 CPU, then 100% CPU usage would be represented as 1. The load average would match theLoad (1/5/15)graph in your DigitalOcean metrics.Hope that this helps. Regards, Bobby