Hey Gregg, drag Activity Monitor to your dock, then it's not "tree levels down". One of the improvements in OS X!
Or, as I just discovered, I can, well,
go to the
Go Menu and select
Utilities which opens the Utilities Folder in Applications, and pluck that Activity Monitor right off the top of the heap. Of course, while AM is running, its icon is in the Dock.
AM shows a bunch of mystery applications running:
57 launchd 0.0 3 512.00 KB 585.73 MB Intel
80 pboard 0.0 1 580.00 KB 586.63 MB Intel
77 UserEventAgent 0.0 2 2.07 MB 588.44 MB Intel
183 mdworker 0.0 4 2.36 MB 598.92 MB Intel
112 AppleSpell.service 0.0 1 3.70 MB 601.71 MB Intel
82 ATSServer 0.0 2 3.26 MB 618.99 MB Intel
90 iTunes Helper 0.0 2 2.26 MB 848.90 MB Intel
76 Spotlight 0.0 2 3.93 MB 859.87 MB Intel
22 loginwindow 0.0 3 4.76 MB 864.86 MB Intel
81 SystemUIServer 0.1 7 8.84 MB 906.80 MB Intel
And the ones that are fundamental:
78 Dock 0.0 3 15.61 MB 915.48 MB Intel
83 Finder 0.0 6 16.18 MB 931.87 MB Intel
As well as the ones I opened:
195 Activity Monitor 1.6 5 12.46 MB 950.21 MB Intel
91 Remember? 0.0 2 17.57 MB 990.02 MB PowerPC
108 Safari 8.3 12 96.17 MB 1.00 GB Intel