Third-party Diagnostics

The utilities available with the operating system or available from third parties are often very useful in providing additional information that can complete the diagnostic picture or indeed identify specific problems directly, for example, with the environment setup or network.

For Windows environments : You might need to obtain additional tools to those included in your operating system. In particular, a suite of tools originally supplied by Sysinternals.com and now distributed by Microsoft include most of the useful tools, for example, procmon).

For UNIX environments : Tools such as strace and truss might be provided as optional installation components, or are otherwise available for download and installation.

The following external utilities have proved useful in providing supporting information when a problem occurs, or in investigating problems that would be exposed directly to the operating system:

For Windows environments

Process Monitor (ProcMon)

This particularly useful tool is part of the Windows SysInternals suite of tools, which you can download from the Microsoft Web site. ProcMon shows path and registry accesses and searches that have been performed across your system. You can view all accesses and searches, or filter them to show specific information.

For an example using ProdMon to troubleshoot the generation of a core file, see Troubleshooting Scenarios using Third-party Diagnostics.

Netstat
TCP/UDP port connection information
Process Explorer
Open handles and DLLs; from the command line
Handle
Open handles/files in the OS
listDLLs
DLLs loaded in a process
Depends
Dependent modules and exported functions
Windows Task Manager
Shows running processes.
Windows Resource Monitor
Shows CPU, disk, network, and memory activity.
Windows Performance Monitor
Shows performance data collector sets, even trace sessions, and produces reports, +SCOM.
Windows Event Viewer
Shows events, logs, and subscriptions.
TCPview and Wireshark
TCP endpoints, addresses and traffic
Debugging Tools for Windows
ADplus, Windbg
Microsoft Network Monitor
NetMon - can trace VPN networks
Rawcap
Can trace the loopback interface

For UNIX environments

strace/truss
lsof
List open files
netstat
TCP/UDP port connection information
ipcs
interprocess communications - for shared memory etc.
ulimit
limits on open files