Thank God, it looks like Microsoft isn’t like Symantec! Back in 2006, when Microsoft bought out software vendor Sysinternals (now Windows Sysinternals), many expressed their anxiety about the future of the Sysinterals product development and whether Microsoft was out to kill the good stuff the company did. NeoSmart Technologies refrained from joining in the discussion back then, and we’re glad we did.
Unlike Symantec, who have a multiple-volume history of buying out the competition and putting them to sleep (anyone remember LC4, PartitionMagic, Sygate, GoBack, and Co.?) after a name change, should appreciate that Microsoft hasn’t done the same. Today Microsoft announced the launch of Process Monitor v1.1.
Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon, and adds an extensive list of enhancements including rich and non-destructive filtering, comprehensive event properties such session IDs and user names, reliable process information, full thread stacks with integrated symbol support for each operation, simultaneous logging to a file, and much more. Its uniquely powerful features will make Process Monitor a core utility in your system troubleshooting and malware hunting toolkit.
Process Monitor’s user interface and options are similar to those of Filemon and Regmon, but it was written from the ground up and includes numerous significant enhancements, such as:
-
Monitoring of process and thread startup and exit, including exit status codes
-
Monitoring of image (DLL and kernel-mode device driver) loads
-
More data captured for operation input and output parameters
-
Non-destructive filters allow you to set filters without losing data
-
Capture of thread stacks for each operation make it possible in many cases to identify the root cause of an operation
-
Reliable capture of process details, including image path, command line, user and session ID
-
Configurable and moveable columns for any event property
-
Filters can be set for any data field, including fields not configured as columns
-
Advanced logging architecture scales to tens of millions of captured events and gigabytes of log data
-
Process tree tool shows relationship of all processes referenced in a trace
-
Native log format preserves all data for loading in a different Process Monitor instance
-
Process tooltip for easy viewing of process image information
-
Detail tooltip allows convenient access to formatted data that doesn’t fit in the column
Most importantly, Process Monitor is fully Windows Vista compliant, giving us a useful tool for just about any debugging or troubleshooting purposes.