Monitoring certain system calls done by a process in Windows

Question

I would like to be able to monitor certain system calls made by a process, primarily file I/O calls. On Linux I can probably get away using strace with suitable parameters, but how can I do this on Windows?

I'm primarily interested in running a process and figuring out which files it has read and written.

I want to do this programmatically from another process. 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.

If I narrow down my requirements even further, it is probably enough to be able to monitor calls to CreateFile(). I'm really only interested in what files are opened, and if they are opened for read/write or just read. 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.

It would also be nice if it did not require administrative privileges.

Answer 1

There are several options on Windows.

Windows Performance Toolkit can be used to enable tracing of various system events, including file I/O, and includes tools for processing and viewing these events. You can use xperf to begin trace variously classes of events and save to an ETL file that you can then process or view using the same tools later.

Process Monitor from Sysinternals is another, very easy to use, option, and enables you to quickly see all file and registry accesses any process on the system is doing. You can also run Process Monitor in an automated fashion.

If you'd like to do this completely programmatically, you can use the ETW functions (StartTrace, EnableTrace, etc.) to snap file I/O events and save to an ETL file. Sample code here.