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I'm looking for a Windows equivalent of Systrace or at least strace. I'm aware of StraceNT, but wondering if there are any more alternatives out there. Specifically, I'm looking for a specific way to programmatically enforce system call policies, though this can be after the fact rather than actively stopping them.

Is there a good way to do this currently?

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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

WinDbg's Logger.exe is the closest to strace: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff552060(v=vs.85).aspx

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However, it's more like ltrace than strace because it captures library calls rather than syscalls. –  Michael Feb 9 '13 at 23:12
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A few options:

Process Monitor

Also, see this article about tools built into Windows 7:

Core OS Tools

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I just used ProcessMonitor to find out why a process was hanging - turns out it was trying to access a file which it couldn't delete... would never have figured it out without ProcMon –  Jamie Cook May 21 '13 at 7:54
I use strace quite a bit on Linux and came across this question while looking for similar tool on Windows for troubleshooting the issue I was having with NANT. I tried Process Monitor, set filter to include only Nant.exe and excluding everything else, also set filter for register access only where I was having problem, and quickly figure out the issue I was having. I highly recommend Process Monitor. –  hman Sep 13 '13 at 22:13
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There are several tools all built around Xperf. It's rather complex but very powerful -- see the quick start guide. There are other useful resources on the Windows Performance Analysis page

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strace is unrelated to performance. It simply prints which system calls a process makes. The performance tools don't seem to do that. –  Jan Hudec Jun 7 '12 at 9:04
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Here is a pretty intersting article, I don't know if it hits the target you are looking for but I think you may find it leading you in the direction you want.


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Thanks, that's pretty good. I guess it means we're still a long way off a nice and functional strace on Windows... –  static_rtti Jul 29 '13 at 9:32
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