Being that we're all power users here, we generally like the process of tweaking and keeping tabs on our mobile devices. This is useful for a variety of reasons. For example, with proper device stats monitoring, you can figure out why your device tends to overheat at times, why your battery "mysteriously" disappears, or quite a lot of other potential issues. While figuring out the root of most issues will require more elaborate tools such as logcat or wakelock detectors, many problems with heat and non-responsive systems can be determined by looking at per-process CPU utilization.

XDA Forum Member cygnus.uvdb offers up a great CPU monitor app that shows a list of every process running on y0ur device, as well as its CPU utilization. Linux and Mac users will immediately be familiar with the concept, as it is essentially the same as running the top command to view real-time stats. This data is then collected and displayed both in the notification area and in the app's interface itself. You can also search within the viewable processes, as well as start and pause collection when you're in the app. Finally, the app is relatively light weight, consuming less than 1% CPU work in background monitoring mode and 4-10% during normal operation--but this will obviously vary device to device.

If you've been looking for a simple CPU stats app that lets you always keep tabs on overall CPU utilization with a notification tray icon, head over to the CPU Monitor app thread to give this a try!