aaPanel Monitoring Beginner

How to monitor server resources in aaPanel

View real-time and historical CPU, RAM, disk, and network usage in aaPanel's monitoring dashboard. Identify resource spikes, diagnose high load, and take action before issues escalate.

UnderHost NOC Network Operations

5 min read Updated June 2026

On this page

The monitoring dashboard
CPU usage
Memory (RAM) usage
Disk usage
Network bandwidth
Running processes
What to do when resources are high

aaPanel's monitoring dashboard provides real-time and historical graphs for the four most important server resources: CPU, RAM, disk, and network. This is one of aaPanel's strengths over panels like CloudPanel-the built-in monitoring is immediately useful without additional software.

The monitoring dashboard

The aaPanel home screen shows a live summary of all resources. For historical graphs:

Log in to aaPanel
Click System Monitoring in the left sidebar (or use the charts on the dashboard home)

The monitoring page shows graphs you can switch between: 1 hour, 1 day, 7 days, or 30 days of historical data. This helps you identify patterns-for example, a CPU spike every day at 3am that corresponds to a backup task.

CPU usage

The CPU graph shows total processor usage as a percentage over time. A single-core VPS running at 100% CPU for sustained periods is a problem-pages will slow down and scheduled tasks may miss their windows.

Normal patterns:

Brief spikes to 80–100% during page loads on a busy site-acceptable if they are short
Sustained 100% CPU-indicates a runaway process, a very high-traffic site, or malware

To see which process is consuming CPU, SSH in and run:

top

Press P to sort by CPU. The top process shows what is consuming the most.

Memory (RAM) usage

The RAM graph shows used vs available memory. When RAM is exhausted, the OS uses swap (disk-based virtual memory), which is much slower. If your VPS is constantly using swap, it needs more RAM or fewer PHP-FPM workers.

Common RAM consumers on a VPS running aaPanel:

PHP-FPM pools (each worker uses 30–100 MB depending on the application)
MySQL/MariaDB (InnoDB buffer pool size is a major factor)
Nginx or Apache (modest)
Redis or Memcached if installed

To check memory usage from the command line:

free -h

Disk usage

The disk usage panel shows total used vs available storage. A full disk is critical-MySQL stops accepting writes, PHP sessions fail, and backups cannot be created.

Common disk space consumers:

Website files and WordPress media uploads
Database data files (large WordPress sites with many revisions)
aaPanel backup archives in /www/backup/
Log files in /www/wwwlogs/ accumulating over time

Check disk usage per directory via SSH:

du -sh /www/* | sort -rh | head -20

Network bandwidth

The network graph shows inbound and outbound traffic in real time and historically. A sudden spike in outbound traffic that does not correspond to a known event (a viral post, a large file download) can indicate:

A site being scraped heavily
A compromised server sending spam or participating in a botnet
A misconfigured backup uploading to a remote location unexpectedly

Running processes

aaPanel's home screen shows active process count. For a full process list, SSH in and use top or htop (install htop via apt install htop). htop provides an interactive, colour-coded process manager that is easier to read than top.

What to do when resources are high

Resource	Immediate action	Long-term fix
High CPU	Identify process with `top`; kill runaway scripts	Enable caching, optimise code, upgrade VPS
High RAM / swap	Restart PHP-FPM to reclaim memory; check for memory leaks	Reduce FPM workers, upgrade RAM
Disk full	Delete old backups and log files immediately	Set log rotation, move backups off-server
High bandwidth	Check access logs for scraping patterns; block offending IPs	Enable CDN (Cloudflare), optimise asset delivery