
Now, filter to only view processes where the result is Access Denied by opening Filter -> Filter: Start by selecting Filter -> Drop Filtered Events.Ĭhoosing this option means that only what is filtered will be saved to the log file, as opposed to only filtering will filter what you see, but will log all to the log file. ProcMon can be run for days if you chose to have it filter for a certain type of event. More on this under Filter Process Monitor Therefore, only run it for the necessary time as leaving it running will likely cause your computer to crash unless you run it to Drop Filtered Events against a certain filter. As soon as you start it, it will begin capturing, and quite quickly will start taking space from your paging file. You must run ProcMon.exe from an elevated command prompt, so that it opens in administrative mode as it needs to install Filter Drivers. This UNC path is a service provided by Microsoft and is referred to as Sysinternals Live. The set of tools is now available on any Windows computer by opening \\\tools\ in file explorer.

Microsoft acquired Winternals on July 18, 2006, which included Sysinternals and the utilities within it.

Sysinternals was originally created in 1996 by Winternals Software and was started by Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich. Process Monitor is a part of Windows Sysinternals which is a set of utilities to manage, diagnose, troubleshoot, and monitor Windows. It is a combination of two older Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon. Process Monitor is a monitoring tool for Windows that shows live file, Registry and process/thread activity.

By mastering ProcMon and other tools in the Windows Sysinternals suite, I was able to showcase my troubleshooting and diagnostic skills to the Microsoft hiring team. I created this tutorial to practice key concepts for my upcoming interview for the Senior Solutions Architect position at Microsoft. I explain how to start and filter ProcMon, find changed values, enable boot logging, and run ProcMon against a remote machine. In this tutorial, I provide an overview of Process Monitor (ProcMon), a powerful Windows monitoring tool.
