Sysinternals and calling them from the Cloud

Its rare that a senior developer, architect, or operations person doesn't know about Sysinternals tools, but it happens. For the few of you who don't know what I'm referring to, Sysinternals is the brand name for more than 70 separate advanced system tools to help you better understand what's happening in your Windows environment. If you've never seen any of these utilities before, I highly recommend the Process Utilities for starters. I probably have used the FileMon, PsKill, Process Explorer, ListDLLs, and Process Monitor the most, but they all ROCK! All utilities are small and you should add them to your USB thumb drive soon.

Back in 2006, Microsoft purchased the entire Sysinternals suite and hired the main guys who owned the mind share, Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell.

On May 28th, we announced the beta of Sysinternals online service so you can use the utilities from the web. For lack of a better name, its called Sysinternals Live. Unlike other online services that download a component to your system an runs them within a memory sandbox, this "Live" services allows you execute your favorite Sysinternals tool over the Internet.

To call them, either from Windows File Explorer, command-line, or the Run dialog, type in \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\<toolname> and Bam! there it is. Nothing glitz. You won't hear any angels sing in the background. Just the application downloaded to your Temp folder and executed from there. [Note for Vista users: Yes...you will be slapped with the User Access Control dialog before it executes. Sorry.] How cool is that?

To look through the list of Sysinternal Live tools, you can view the directory from a browser by going to https://live.sysinternals.com or using Windows File Explorer using \\live.sysinternals.com\tools. Even though you run them from the Cloud, I still recommend you keep you them on a thumbdrive and/or CD, just in case you case you you lost Internet access (which of course never happens).

Excelsior!