Processes sometimes hang because they are waiting for a resource that has been locked by another process. Some programs run one, while others are written to work continuously in a loop (daemons).

The RegMon utility from Sysinternals provided forensics on Windows Registry usage.When a piece of software starts up, the operating system serving it creates a program to run the associated program. FileMon įileMon (from a concatenation of 'File' and 'Monitor') was a free utility for 32/64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems which provided users with a powerful tool to monitor and display file system activity. It is licensed under MIT License and the source code is available on GitHub. The Linux port of the software is open source.

In November 2018, Microsoft confirmed it is porting Sysinternals tools, including ProcDump and ProcMon, to Linux. Initially, ProcMon was only available for Microsoft Windows. The current version for Windows only runs on Windows Vista and above.

Early versions of Process Monitor (up to version 2.8) ran on Windows 2000 SP4 with Update Rollup 1. The two tools were combined to create Process Monitor. RegMon and its sister application Filemon were primarily created by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, employed by NuMega Technologies and later SysInternals prior SysInternals being bought out by Microsoft in 2006. In addition it shows how applications use files and DLLs, detects some critical errors in system files and more. It also allows for filtering on specific keys, processes, process IDs, and values. Process Monitor can be used to detect failed attempts to read and write registry keys. Process Monitor monitors and records all actions attempted against the Microsoft Windows Registry.

Process monitor license