The columns that are displayed are configurable. (See Figure 1.)īy default, as soon as it comes up Process Monitor starts scrolling thousands of lines of data about the activities going on with most of the processes on your system. The screen for Process Monitor is displayed below. From then on, you'll be able to run it without seeing that initial screen.

The first time you launch it, you're presented with an agreement that you should click to agree with. exe file that can be run either from the command line or from Windows Explorer. The best way to understand Process Monitor is to actually use it, so the first thing to do is to download it from their site: Personally, I use it the most when I want to track activity on a particular file or track exactly what a certain process is doing. With Process Monitor, you can capture process details, including image path, command line, user and session ID configure the GUI to have it present whatever columns are of interest set include/exclude filters for any data field-even those whose columns are not displayed and much more. Don't worry, though-you'll learn how to filter the data so that you can hone in on exactly what you want to monitor without being overwhelmed with data you don't care about. In fact, its default configuration makes it too good because you are quickly overwhelmed by how much data gets presented to you. Process Monitor is great for monitoring all the activity that goes on for all the processes on your system. Another tip talks about their Process Explorer, so I thought I'd introduce you to their Process Monitor tool. The folks at Sysinternals produce some high-quality and very useful Windows tools.

Sysinternals file monitor