In Windows, this utility is the Task Manager. Sysinternals Process Monitor An alternative to the Process Explorer and available for free from Microsoft.Īll operating systems include a utility that shows current processes.

Sysinternals Process Explorer A free process monitor that is straightforward and easy to use.

Datadog Infrastructure A cloud-based service that monitors networks, servers, and applications.

Zabbix An attractive user interface fronts this free monitoring system for networks, servers, and applications.

Icinga 2 A fork of Nagios with a very good interface and great data visualizations.

It runs on Linux and can be run over a VM on top of Windows.

Nagios XI An infrastructure monitor that includes server monitoring and has thousands of extensions available.

The tool is able to present live data on processes.

Paessler PRTG (FREE TRIAL) An infrastructure monitor that covers networks, servers, and applications.

ManageEngine Applications Manager (FREE TRIAL) A monitor for applications that also tracks the processes that they spawn and checks the health of the host.

It can monitor multiple servers on many sites and also cloud servers.

Site24x7 (FREE TRIAL) A cloud-based monitoring service that has a server and application monitoring module.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor EDITOR’S CHOICE A tool to monitor the health of servers and the processes that they run in support of applications.

Here is our list of the ten best processing monitoring tools: However, this can be a time-consuming task and it is better to use an automated tool to monitor and manage processes.

It is a good idea to look through the list of processes and kill off any that seem to have stalled and remove suspicious processes that you don’t recognize. Programs are not always written to deal with every eventuality and there can be processes still live, while effectively not doing anything. 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). When a piece of software starts up, the operating system serving it creates a program to run the associated program.

System monitor sysinternals