To enable the hierarchical process view in Activity Monitor, head back to the Menu Bar and select View > All Processes, Hierarchically. Most users know that you can sort the list of processes by clicking on one of the header columns, or use the search box in the upper-right to filter for a particular name, but you can potentially make things even easier to understand by viewing processes hierarchically. Viewing all processes can make Activity Monitor even more difficult to analyze.

For those who are trying to troubleshoot an issue, or merely just curious, one way to make Activity Monitor easier to understand is to enable a better view of your active processes.īy default, Activity Monitor (located in Applications > Utilities) will display a list of only “My Processes.” These are the application and user-level system processes associated with the current user account, not any processes associated with another user on the Mac or system-level processes that are run regardless of which user is active.įor a complete picture of all processes running on your Mac, something that may be important when troubleshooting, you can change from the default Activity Monitor view by heading to View > All Processes in the Menu Bar. Get a Better Look at Your Mac By Viewing Processes Hierarchically in Activity MonitorĪctivity Monitor in OS X can give you great insights into how your Mac’s software, services, and hardware are getting along, but despite Apple’s attempts to make the interface easier to use, it can still be quite confusing to understand exactly how the hundreds or thousands of background processes that make your Mac work are connected.

Osx process monitor