This is an introduction to understanding what your PostgreSQL database management system is doing by using pg_top and pg_systat open source tools. These tools provide a simple way for identifying the PostgreSQL processes using the most the processor, memory, or storage resources. They also allow reviewing many of the PostgreSQL statistics tables to spot things like the most heavily accessed tables and indexes.

While pg_top and pg_systat are terminal based tools, the concepts presented here can be applied to other tools whether they are terminal, graphical, or Web based.