ctop – manage and monitor your Docker containers

In this post, I’d like to introduce you to a nice command line tool called ctop. I discovered it when I was looking for a tool to monitor some Docker containers for a MongoDB replica set on my local machine while running some load tests.

ctop is basically a better version of docker stats. To install it on MacOS you can simply use

1$ brew install ctop

After that, just run

1$ ctop

Assuming you have some running Docker containers, the main view displays all running (and also all inactive) containers:

The columns are showing the same KPIs like memory, CPU usage and so on that you may know from docker stats. But … with ctop, you select a container (using up and down arrows) and perform the following actions on it:

You can

• switch to a detail view of a single container
• inspect a container’s log
• stop a running container
• start and remove an inactive container (not shown in the above screenshot)

The detailed view looks like this and displays some time-based ASCII charts for the KPIs:

All in all, it is a nice tool that makes managing and monitoring Docker containers a bit easier.

For download and full documentation, check out the ctop GutHub page .