Why is db2top screen output not being shown in colors?

Question

Why is db2top screen output not being shown in colors?

Cause

db2top is a monitoring tool included in DB2 for LUW on AIX, Linux, and Solaris platforms. Sometimes this utility is not shown in colors, Even though the monochromatic view of db2top is very useful, db2top can use colors when using the interactive screen mode to highlight some outputs and that can be more useful and attractive to some users.

Answer

The most common reasons to see db2top without colors are the following:

Your term emulator and/or your TERM environment setting cannot manage colors. In this case using xterm or dtterm at your TERM environment setting and use a term emulator capable to emulate either xterm or dtterm would be enough to show db2top in colors.

Your db2top configuration is not configured to show the output in colors, In order to check if db2top is configured to manage colors just execute the utility "db2top -d <database>" (where database is any database active on your instance), and once you are seeing the db2top main screen, just press "w" key, this writes the db2top configuration file and shows its current values:

Ensure the parameter "colors" is set to "ON". If it is configured to "OFF" you can edit directly the configuration file indicated by the first line of the above screen ("/home/db2inst1/.db2toprc" in this case) in order to set this parameter to "ON".

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21458782