Microsoft ProvMon tool released for Linux

Microsoft has released for real-time LInux, ProcMon, a real-time data monitoring tool.

Microsoft said it revealed some time ago that it intended to bring some of the tools provided by Sysinternals to Linux. One of these tools mentioned at the time was Process Monitor or ProcMon for short. A preview version of the application is now available for Linux operating systems.

Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows, which displays real-time data such as registry, thread activity, etc. It is a powerful tool that supports the recording of information in files for future analysis.

The program is highly configurable, supports non-destructive filters, can and does collect stacks of threads, download running processes, and record startup times.

The Linux version of Procmon is now available on GitHub. The tool is open source and is released as a Preview. This means that it is limited to systems running Ubuntu 18.04 with a 4.18 to 5.3 kernel.

Microsoft plans to add more configurations for various Linux systems in the future. Currently the installation instructions on Ubuntu 18.04 devices are quite simple. You only have to execute the following commands:

1. wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/$(lsb_release -rs) /packages-microsoft-prod.deb -O packages-microsoft-prod.deb
2. sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb
3. sudo apt-get update
4. sudo apt-get install procmon

The Construction instructions are also provided on the GitHub website where Linux users can download a .deb file from the Versions section of the ProcMon GitHub page.

After installation you can run the procmon -h command to see the help screen. In general, Procmon is a powerful advanced monitoring tool for your system.