Viewing resource usage with CPU graphs

In this article I'll go over the resource usage CPU graphs that are available to your account in cPanel on our shared hosting servers.

If you are near or over your account's CPU limit, we would strongly encourage you to take a look at our what is high system resource usage article, as this goes more in-depth as to what exactly commonly causes high resource usage.

If your account is consistently going over your CPU limits, a warning email could be dispatched, or a temporary account suspension could be put in place if the usage was extreme enough. So it's very important to know how to view your resource usage information.

Viewing CPU resource usage graphs

Following the steps below, I'll show you how to access the CPU resource usage graphs in cPanel, and give an explanation of what the data means.

1. Login to your cPanel.
2. Under the Logs section, click on Resource Usage.
3. Here we can see in the top hourly graph that this account's CPU usage had a sudden spike after 03:00 in the morning today.

    

   However this CPU spike appears to be out of the ordinary, as you can see from the monthly CPU usage graph at the bottom, this account hasn't gone above 20% of their daily CPU usage limits.

   In your own CPU usage graphs, if you're consistently above the 100% utilization line in either graph, you'd want to start thinking about how to optimize your usage, or upgrade to a platform with higher levels of CPU usage being allowed.

You should now understand how to view the CPU resource usage graphs of your account in cPanel, so that you can check to ensure your account is running on the appropiate hosting platform for its usage.

It can be a good idea to ensure you have enabled raw access log archiving in cPanel as well. That way if you notice in the monthly graph that your CPU usage was fine everyday but one, you can take a look at that one day's requests and see what might have caused the higher than normal usage.