pranshuparmar/witr

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

21701 stars · 756 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

witr is a CLI and TUI tool that traces any running process, port, container, or file back to the exact chain of systems that started it, answering 'why is this running?'. It outputs human-readable trees or machine-readable JSON and runs as a single static binary on Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD.

Use cases

• find out why a process is running on my server
• trace which service started a port listener
• figure out what launched a container
• debug unexpected background processes during incident response
• trace a process back to its systemd unit or supervisor
• identify the parent chain of a runaway process
• see what started a node process managed by pm2

When to choose

• you need to explain the origin of a process, port, or container beyond what ps/lsof/ss show
• you want one command with machine-readable JSON output for automation
• you work across Linux, macOS, Windows, or FreeBSD and need a single static binary
• you're doing incident response or sysadmin troubleshooting

When to avoid

• you only need to list or monitor processes rather than trace their origin
• you need deep kernel-level tracing or eBPF-based observability
• you want a GUI-based system monitor

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

monitoring developer-tools cli terminal-ui developer-tools monitoring windows bsd cli process-tracing troubleshooting observability incident-response tui systemd go devops command-line containers linux macos docker kubernetes

Member repositories

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="pranshuparmar/witr")