Management of hierarchical process groups is provided. Aspects include creating a group identifier having an associated set of resource limits for shared resources of a processing system. A process is associated with the group identifier. A hierarchical process group is created including the process as a parent process and at least one child process spawned from the parent process, where the at least one child process inherits the group identifier. A container is created to store resource usage of the hierarchical process group and the set of resource limits of the group identifier. The set of resources associated with the hierarchical process group is used to collectively monitor resource usage of processes. A resource allocation adjustment action is performed in the processing system based on determining that an existing process exceeds a process resource limit or the hierarchical process group exceeds at least one of the set of resource limits.