innotop
A real-time, terminal-based "top" for MySQL — live views of queries, InnoDB transactions and locks, replication, and server status, across one server or many.
innotop is a “top” clone for MySQL: a command-line monitor that refreshes continuously and shows what the server is doing right now. It has a separate mode for each aspect of a running server, switched with a single keypress — the query list, InnoDB transactions, deadlocks, lock waits, and foreign-key errors; InnoDB buffer pool, I/O, and row operations; master/slave replication and Group Replication member status; open tables, a command summary, user statistics, and raw variables and status — plus a health dashboard with one row per monitored server.
It can watch many servers at once and aggregate across them, is fully customizable (it even has a plugin interface), and can also run non-interactively for pipe-and-filter use in scripts. The manual is embedded in the program itself and is available through perldoc and man. It’s written in Perl, needs only a handful of common modules (DBI, DBD::mysql, Term::ReadKey, and Time::HiRes), and is packaged for Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and FreeBSD.
The tool was originally written by Baron Schwartz in 2006 and remains actively maintained on GitHub — the 1.16.0 release (May 2026) reworked query EXPLAIN support and added EXPLAIN ANALYZE, following earlier releases that added MySQL 8.0 and 9.x compatibility, SSL, and Group Replication support. Its user-statistics mode also surfaces the table and index statistics added by Percona Server and MariaDB.
It’s released under the GPL-2.0 license (the source also offers the Perl Artistic License as an alternative).
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