Process Monitor, or simply “Procmon”, downloads as a zip file. We’ll start by downloading and installing Process Monitor. I’ll walk you through how to set it up for this scenario. While it’s a little geeky, this extremely powerful tool can be used to diagnose many issues, and runs in all versions of Windows from XP to the most recent. I suspect it’ll be perfect for this problem. The technique I’ll describe uses a free tool called Process Monitor.

With the amount of information now being stored and/or delivered over the internet, our connections are being stressed more than ever. It would also be nice if it did not require administrative privileges.Both of these problems are quite common, and it’s quite frustrating when they arise. Another requirement which I didn't really state is that speed is fairly important I was planning on doing this for things like compiling a C++-file, and pulling up a full GUI which generates a 20 MB logfile will have prohibitive overhead. I'm really only interested in what files are opened, and if they are opened for read/write or just read. If I narrow down my requirements even further, it is probably enough to be able to monitor calls to CreateFile(). I'm aware of Process Monitor, but I would like to receive the data in a form which I can import into another program for further analysis. I want to do this programmatically from another process. I'm primarily interested in running a process and figuring out which files it has read and written. On Linux I can probably get away using strace with suitable parameters, but how can I do this on Windows? I would like to be able to monitor certain system calls made by a process, primarily file I/O calls.