Top is a simple yet powerful command to see what is going on in your Linux system.

The most straight forward way to use top is typing top in your command line. This will give a a quick view of the processes in the system. Those key strokes are useful in this mode:

1. q, quit
   
2. space or enter, refresh the view
3. M, sort by %MEM column
4. T, sort by TIME column
5. P, sort by %CPU column
6. m, toggle memory usage section display (less useful)
   
7. t, toggle task/cpu section display (less useful)

You can also run top in batch mode and pipe results out for post processing. For example:
top -b > /tmp/top.output
This will give you one snapshot. For multiple iterations, you can use -n # option. Also you can limit your output to certain processes by specifying process id. For example:
top -b -n 5 -p 12639, 6932 > /tmp/top.output
This will give you 5 iterations of usage of process 12639 and 6932

One last option in batch mode you may need is -u or -U which is the user id or name. For example:
top -b -n 2 -u alex
or
top -b -n 2 -u 1012

You can set up a cron job to run top periodically and process the output if your application doesn't have more sophisticated monitoring mechanism built in.