I use it a lot. As soon as I log on to a box. After I restart something with god. After I pull. etc etc…

People ask why I use it so much. Knowing the state of a box is important to being able to prevent and diagnose problems and I find a lot of issues with ps.

A lot of times, I’ll find new issues just because I randomly did a ps and noticed something weird.

It’s one of my first tools in debugging system level issues.

For example, I recently had a problem where Nagios was not saving acknowledgments, and configuration changes were getting reset.

Logged on to our monitoring box, ps faux:

Dec02 183:02 nagios
15:58 0:22 nagios

.. oh 2 instances running, that’s weird. Problem identified.

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