About motop
Most tools that answer server questions are confident about things they've never done. motop is built the other way round: it answers from problems that actually happened, and says so plainly when it doesn't have one.
Where the answers come from
Behind motop is a knowledge base of real incidents and runbooks — things that broke on production systems and were written up afterwards: the symptom, the investigation including the dead ends, the fix that worked, and what to check next time.
It is written by a working sysadmin, from their own cases. Not scraped from forums, not generated. When motop says from documented experience, it means someone actually fixed this on a real server.
There are 14 entries today. That is deliberately narrow rather than comprehensive — an entry exists only because the problem genuinely happened, so the base grows slowly and stays trustworthy.
How it answers
Describe a symptom in your own words — no need to phrase it precisely. motop finds the closest documented entry and shows it to you in full, citing which one it used so you can judge the source yourself rather than taking its word.
If nothing in the knowledge base fits, it says so. It will not invent a runbook to look useful.
What motop is not
It cannot see your servers
There is no agent, no SSH, no access of any kind. motop only knows what you type into it — which also means it can't break anything on its own.
It can be wrong
Your setup is not the one in the runbook. Verify against your own environment, take your own backups, and never run a destructive command on the strength of an answer alone.
It is not a support contract
motop is a reference you can talk to, not someone on call. It has no duty of care for your systems and no guaranteed uptime.
It is narrow on purpose
A knowledge base that covered everything would be one that made things up. Expect gaps — and tell us about them, because that is how the gaps get closed.
Why it's free
Because it costs almost nothing to run. Answers are matched on our own hardware rather than billed per question, so there is no meter to pass on to you. No account limits, no card, no trial that expires.
If motop saves you an afternoon you can buy me a coffee. Entirely optional — it buys you nothing extra, and the honest truth is that a good bug report is worth more.
Get in touch
If motop gave you an answer that was wrong or unsafe for your setup, please say so — that feedback is how the knowledge base gets corrected. Same for a problem it couldn't answer at all. Contact reaches a real person, or ask motop something first.