# 28.3. Viewing Locks

Another useful tool for monitoring database activity is the `pg_locks` system table. It allows the database administrator to view information about the outstanding locks in the lock manager. For example, this capability can be used to:

* View all the locks currently outstanding, all the locks on relations in a particular database, all the locks on a particular relation, or all the locks held by a particular PostgreSQL session.
* Determine the relation in the current database with the most ungranted locks (which might be a source of contention among database clients).
* Determine the effect of lock contention on overall database performance, as well as the extent to which contention varies with overall database traffic.

Details of the `pg_locks` view appear in [Section 54.12](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/15/view-pg-locks.html). For more information on locking and managing concurrency with PostgreSQL, refer to [Chapter 13](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/15/mvcc.html).