Programs for computer diagnostics and testing. Free computer tracking program: keylogger, hidden screenshots, program launches and more

Programs for monitoring the operation of a computer and individual objects.

↓ New in the "Monitoring" category:

Free
SpeedFan 4.46 is an application that allows you to control the temperature and speed of the system fans. The SpeedFan application supports work with almost any of the monitoring chips, and also makes it possible to dynamically change the speed that characterizes the rotation of the fans, based on data on the temperature inside the computer case.

Free
S&M 1.9.1 is an application that checks for RAM, CPU stability, and hard drives. In addition, the S&M application will help you monitor the voltages of the motherboard and display a window with the results of the test.

Free
RAM Saver Pro 11.11 is an application that allows you to perform professional monitoring, cleaning and optimization for RAM. The RAM Saver Pro application will help improve the performance of the entire operating system, and also free up RAM from drivers or unnecessary running processes.

Free
Notebook Hardware Control 2.4.3 is an application that manages hardware components in laptop computers. The Notebook Hardware Control application will help increase the service life of batteries, as well as cool the system by controlling the voltage on the processor and the frequency of the video card, for which the ATI Clock Control and CPU Voltage Control utilities are used.

Free
MotherBoard Monitor 5.3.7.0 is a monitoring application for the motherboard. The MotherBoard Monitor application will help you obtain information regarding the temperatures of the installed motherboard or your processor, as well as voltages that can be measured at test points or fan speeds.

Free
HWMonitor 1.19 is an application that monitors indicators for various computer components. The HWMonitor app checks the temperature, as well as fan speed or voltage.

Free
Filemon 7.04 is an application that monitors and displays all file system activity on your computer. Filemon has advanced filtering and search capabilities that make it a powerful tool for conducting system investigations, monitoring which programs are using DLLs and files, or monitoring problems in application or system configurations.

Free
EVEREST Ultimate Edition 5.50 is an application that diagnoses, tests and configures your computer's hardware and software for optimal performance.

Free
CPUCooL 8.1.0 is an application that provides capabilities for monitoring voltages and temperatures for the computer power supply, as well as monitoring and adjusting the rotation speed for fans on most motherboards that are built on SIS, ALI, AMD, NVIDIA, Intel or VIA chipsets .

Free
ClockGen 1.0.5.3 is an application that allows you to dynamically overclock your system. The ClockGen application will allow you to change such unique parameters as processor frequency, memory, PCI bus frequency - PCI, AGP and Express.

Free
ASUS SmartDoctor 5.57 is an application from ASUS that works with video cards based on ATI or NVIDIA graphics chipsets. The Smart Doctor application will help monitor the status of the video card, report any malfunctions that occur due to overheating, stopping fans or other problems, as well as the temperature of the chipset, memory, fan speed, and so on.

Free
ASUS PC Probe II 1.04.92 is an application designed to monitor PC hardware. The ASUS PC Probe application will display the voltage generated by the power supply, the temperature of the motherboard or processor, and the fan speed.

Hello.

When working at a computer, sometimes various kinds of failures and errors occur, and getting to the bottom of the reason for their occurrence without special software is not an easy task! In this help article, I want to post the best programs for testing and diagnosing PCs, which will help in solving a wide variety of problems.

By the way, some of the programs can not only restore the computer’s functionality, but also “kill” Windows (you will have to reinstall the OS), or cause the PC to overheat. Therefore, be careful with such utilities (it’s definitely not worth experimenting without knowing what this or that function does).

CPU testing

Rice. 1. CPU-Z main window

A free program for determining all the characteristics of a processor: name, core type and stepping, socket used, support for certain multimedia instructions, cache memory size and parameters. There is a portable version that does not require installation.

By the way, processors of even the same name can be slightly different: for example, different cores with different steppings. Some information can be found on the processor cover, but usually it is hidden far away in the system unit and is not easy to get to.

Another important advantage of this utility is its ability to create a text report. In turn, such a report can be useful when solving a wide variety of problems with a PC problem. I recommend having such a utility in your arsenal!

One of the most frequently used utilities, at least on my computer. Allows you to solve a wide range of problems:

Control over startup (removing everything unnecessary from startup);

Monitor the temperature of the processor, hard drive, video card;

Obtaining summary information on the computer and on any of its hardware in particular. This information can be indispensable when searching for drivers for rare hardware:

In general, in my humble opinion, this is one of the best system utilities, containing everything you need. By the way, many experienced users are familiar with the predecessor of this program - Everest (by the way, they are very similar).

One of the best programs for testing the performance of a computer's processor and RAM. The program is based on complex mathematical calculations that can completely and permanently load even the most powerful processor!

By the way, the program works in all popular Windows operating systems today: XP, 7, 8, 10.

Temperature monitoring and analysis

Temperature is one performance indicator that can say a lot about the reliability of a PC. The temperature is usually measured for three PC components: the processor, the hard drive and the video card (they are the ones that most often overheat).

By the way, the AIDA 64 utility measures the temperature quite well (about it in the article above, I also recommend this link:).

SpeedFan

This small utility can not only monitor the temperature of hard drives and the processor, but also help adjust the rotation speed of coolers. On some PCs they make a lot of noise, thereby irritating the user. Moreover, you can reduce their rotation speed without harming the computer (adjusting the rotation speed is recommended for experienced users, This operation may cause your PC to overheat!).

Core Temp

A small program that measures temperature directly from the processor sensor (bypassing unnecessary ports). The accuracy of the readings is one of the best of its kind!

Programs for overclocking and monitoring video card performance

By the way, for those who want to speed up a video card without using third-party utilities (i.e., no overclocking and no risks), I recommend reading the articles on fine-tuning video cards:

Rice. 6. Riva Tuner

A once very popular utility for fine-tuning Nvidia video cards. Allows you to overclock an Nvidia video card both through standard drivers and “directly”, working with hardware. That is why you should work with it carefully, without going too far with the parameter settings (especially if you have not yet had experience working with such utilities).

Also, quite well, this utility can help with settings for resolution (locking it, useful in many games), frame rate (not relevant for modern monitors).

By the way, the program has its own “basic” driver and registry settings for certain work cases (for example, when starting a game, the utility can switch the video card operating mode to the required one).

Rice. 7. ATITool - main window

A very interesting program for overclocking ATI and nVIDIA video cards. It has automatic overclocking functions, and also has a special algorithm for “loading” the video card in three-dimensional mode (see Fig. 7, above).

When testing in three-dimensional mode, you can find out the number of FPS produced by the video card with one or another fine tuning, and also immediately notice artifacts and defects in the graphics (by the way, this moment means that it is dangerous to overclock the video card further). In general, an indispensable tool when trying to overclock a graphics adapter!

Recovering information if accidentally deleted or formatted

Quite a large and extensive topic that deserves a whole separate article (and more than one). On the other hand, it would be wrong not to include it in this article. Therefore, here, in order not to repeat myself and not to increase the size of this article to “huge” sizes, I will only provide links to my other articles on this topic.

Recovering Word documents -

Determining a malfunction (primary diagnosis) of a hard drive by sound:

A huge directory of the most popular data recovery programs:

Testing RAM

Also, the topic is quite extensive and cannot be described in a few words. Typically, if there are problems with RAM, the PC behaves as follows: freezes, “ ” appears, spontaneous reboot, etc. For more details, see the link below.

Hard drive analysis and testing

Analysis of the occupied space on the hard drive -

Hard drive slows down, analysis and search for reasons -

Checking the hard drive for functionality, searching for bad problems -

Cleaning your hard drive from temporary files and junk -

That's all for me today. I would be grateful for additions and recommendations on the topic of the article. Good luck with your PC.

In the previous article, a list of 80 tools for monitoring Linux systems was compiled. It also made sense to make a selection of tools for the Windows system. The following is a list that serves as a starting point only, there is no ranking.

1.Task Manager

The well-known Windows Task Manager is a utility for displaying a list of running processes and the resources they consume. But do you know how to use its full potential? As a rule, it is used to monitor the state of the processor and memory, but you can go much further. This application is pre-installed on all Microsoft operating systems.

2. Resource Monitor

A great tool to estimate CPU, RAM, network and disk usage in Windows. It allows you to quickly obtain all the necessary information about the status of critical servers.

3.Performance Monitor

The main tool for managing performance counters in Windows. Performance Monitor, known to us as System Monitor in earlier versions of Windows. The utility has several display modes, displays performance counters in real time, and saves data to log files for later study.

4.Reliability Monitor

Reliability Monitor - System stability monitor, allows you to monitor any changes in computer performance, you can find the stability monitor in Windows 7, in Windows 8: Control Panel > System and Security > Action Center. Using Reliability Monitor, you can keep track of changes and failures on your computer, the data will be displayed in a convenient graphical form, which will allow you to track which application and when caused an error or froze, track the appearance of the Windows blue screen of death, the reason for its appearance (the next Windows update or installation of the program).

5.Microsoft SysInternals

SysInternals is a complete set of programs for administering and monitoring computers running Windows OS. You can download them for yourself for free on the Microsoft website. Sysinternals utilities help manage, troubleshoot, and diagnose Windows applications and operating systems.

6. SCOM (part of Microsoft System Center)

System Center is a complete set of tools for managing IT infrastructure, with which you can manage, deploy, monitor, configure Microsoft software (Windows, IIS, SQLServer, Exchange, and so on). Unfortunately, MSC is not free. SCOM is used for proactive monitoring of key IT infrastructure objects.

Monitoring Windows servers using the Nagios family

7. Nagios

Nagios has been the most popular infrastructure monitoring tool for several years (for Linux and Windows). If you are considering Nagios for Windows, then install and configure the agent on the Windows server. NSClient++ monitors the system in real time and provides outputs from a remote monitoring server and more.

8. Cacti

Typically used in conjunction with Nagios, it provides the user with a convenient web interface to the RRDTool utility, designed to work with Round Robin Databases, which are used to store information about changes in one or more quantities over a certain period of time. Statistics on network devices are presented in the form of a tree, the structure of which is specified by the user; you can plot channel usage, HDD partition usage, display resource latency, etc.

9. Shinken

A flexible, scalable, open source monitoring system based on the Nagios core written in Python. It is 5 times faster than Nagios. Shinken is compatible with Nagios, you can use its plugins and configurations without making adjustments or additional configuration.

10. Icinga

Another popular open monitoring system that checks hosts and services and reports their status to the administrator. As a fork of Nagios, Icinga is compatible with it and they have a lot in common.

11. OpsView

OpsView was originally free. Now, unfortunately, users of this monitoring system have to shell out money.

Op5 is another open source monitoring system. Plotting, storing and collecting data.

Alternatives to Nagios

Open source software for monitoring and tracking the status of various computer network services, servers and network equipment, used to obtain data on processor load, network usage, disk space and the like.

14. Munin

A good monitoring system that collects data from several servers simultaneously and displays everything in the form of graphs, with which you can track all past events on the server.

15.Zenoss

Written in Python using the Zope application server, data is stored in MySQL. With Zenoss you can
monitor network services, system resources, device performance, the Zenoss kernel analyzes the environment. This makes it possible to quickly understand a large number of specific devices.

16. Observium

A monitoring and surveillance system for network devices and servers, although the list of supported devices is huge and is not limited to network devices; the device must support SNMP.

17. Centreon

A comprehensive monitoring system allows you to monitor the entire infrastructure and applications containing system information. Free alternative to Nagios.

18. Ganglia

Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system used in high-performance computing systems such as clusters and grids. Monitors statistics and computation history in real time for each of the monitored nodes.

19. Pandora FMS

Monitoring system, good productivity and scalability, one monitoring server can monitor the work of several thousand hosts.

20. NetXMS

Open source software for monitoring computer systems and networks.

21.OpenNMS

OpenNMS monitoring platform. Unlike Nagios, it supports SNMP, WMI and JMX.

22. HypericHQ

A component of the VMware vRealize Operations suite, it is used to monitor OS, middleware and applications in physical, virtual and cloud environments. Displays availability, performance, usage, events, logs, and changes at every level of the virtualization stack (from the vSphere hypervisor to guest OSes).

23. Bosun

Open source monitoring and alert system from StackExchange. Bosun has a well-thought-out data design, as well as a powerful language for processing it.

24. Sensu

Sensu is an open source alert system similar to Nagios. There is a simple dashboard, you can see a list of clients, checks and triggered alerts. The framework provides the mechanisms needed to collect and accumulate server operation statistics. Each server runs a Sensu agent (client) that uses a set of scripts to check the functionality of services, their status and collect any other information.

25. CollectM

CollectM collects statistics about system resource usage every 10 seconds. It can collect statistics for several hosts and send it to the server, the information is displayed using graphs.

28. Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool

34. Total Network Monitor

This is a program for constantly monitoring the operation of a local network of individual computers, network and system services. Total Network Monitor generates a report and notifies you about errors that have occurred. You can check any aspect of the operation of a service, server or file system: FTP, POP/SMTP, HTTP, IMAP, Registry, Event Log, Service State and others.

35. PRTG

38.Idera

Supports multiple operating systems and virtualization technologies. There are many free tools that you can use to monitor your system.

39. PowerAdmin

PowerAdmin is a commercial monitoring solution.

40. ELM Enterprise Manager

ELM Enterprise Manager - complete monitoring from “what happened” to “what is happening” in real time. Monitoring tools in ELM include - Event Collector, Performance Monitor, Service Monitor, Process Monitor, File Monitor, PING Monitor.

41.EventsEntry

42. Veeam ONE

A powerful solution for monitoring, reporting, and scheduling resources across VMware, Hyper-V, and Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure, monitors the health of your IT infrastructure and diagnoses problems before they impact your user experience.

43. CA Unified Infrastructure Management (formerly CA Nimsoft Monitor, Unicenter)

Monitors the performance and availability of Windows server resources.

44. HP Operations Manager

This infrastructure monitoring software performs proactive root cause analysis, reducing recovery time and reducing operations management costs. The solution is ideal for automated monitoring.

45.Dell OpenManage

OpenManage (now Dell Enterprise Systems Management) is an all-in-one monitoring product.

46. ​​Halcyon Windows Server Manager

Management and monitoring of networks, applications and infrastructure.

Below is a list of (most popular) network monitoring tools

55.NeDi

Nedi is an open source network monitoring tool.

54. The Dude

The Dude monitoring system, although free, is, according to experts, in no way inferior to commercial products; it monitors individual servers, networks and network services.

55.BandwidthD

Open source program.

56. NagVis

An extension for Nagios that allows you to create infrastructure maps and display their status. NagVis supports a large number of different widgets and icon sets.

57. Proc Net Monitor

A free monitoring application that allows you to track all active processes and, if necessary, quickly stop them to reduce the load on the processor.

58. PingPlotter

Used to diagnose IP networks, it allows you to determine where losses and delays of network packets occur.

Small but useful tools

60. Glint Computer Activity Monitor

61.RealTemp

A utility for monitoring temperatures of Intel processors, it does not require installation; it tracks the current, minimum and maximum temperature values ​​for each core and the start of throttling.

62. SpeedFan

A utility that allows you to control the temperature and fan speeds in the system, monitors the performance of sensors on the motherboard, video card and hard drives.

63.OpenHardwareMonitor

In the previous article, a list of 80 tools for monitoring Linux systems was compiled. It also made sense to make a selection of tools for the Windows system. The following is a list that serves as a starting point only, there is no ranking.

1.Task Manager

The well-known Windows Task Manager is a utility for displaying a list of running processes and the resources they consume. But do you know how to use its full potential? As a rule, it is used to monitor the state of the processor and memory, but you can go much further. This application is pre-installed on all Microsoft operating systems.

2. Resource Monitor

A great tool to estimate CPU, RAM, network and disk usage in Windows. It allows you to quickly obtain all the necessary information about the status of critical servers.

3.Performance Monitor

The main tool for managing performance counters in Windows. Performance Monitor, known to us as System Monitor in earlier versions of Windows. The utility has several display modes, displays performance counters in real time, and saves data to log files for later study.

4.Reliability Monitor

Reliability Monitor - System stability monitor, allows you to monitor any changes in computer performance, you can find the stability monitor in Windows 7, in Windows 8: Control Panel > System and Security > Action Center. Using Reliability Monitor, you can keep track of changes and failures on your computer, the data will be displayed in a convenient graphical form, which will allow you to track which application and when caused an error or froze, track the appearance of the Windows blue screen of death, the reason for its appearance (the next Windows update or installation of the program).

5.Microsoft SysInternals

SysInternals is a complete set of programs for administering and monitoring computers running Windows OS. You can download them for yourself for free on the Microsoft website. Sysinternals utilities help manage, troubleshoot, and diagnose Windows applications and operating systems.

6. SCOM (part of Microsoft System Center)

System Center is a complete set of tools for managing IT infrastructure, with which you can manage, deploy, monitor, configure Microsoft software (Windows, IIS, SQLServer, Exchange, and so on). Unfortunately, MSC is not free. SCOM is used for proactive monitoring of key IT infrastructure objects.

Monitoring Windows servers using the Nagios family

7. Nagios

Nagios has been the most popular infrastructure monitoring tool for several years (for Linux and Windows). If you are considering Nagios for Windows, then install and configure the agent on the Windows server. NSClient++ monitors the system in real time and provides outputs from a remote monitoring server and more.

8. Cacti

Typically used in conjunction with Nagios, it provides the user with a convenient web interface to the RRDTool utility, designed to work with Round Robin Databases, which are used to store information about changes in one or more quantities over a certain period of time. Statistics on network devices are presented in the form of a tree, the structure of which is specified by the user; you can plot channel usage, HDD partition usage, display resource latency, etc.

9. Shinken

A flexible, scalable, open source monitoring system based on the Nagios core written in Python. It is 5 times faster than Nagios. Shinken is compatible with Nagios, you can use its plugins and configurations without making adjustments or additional configuration.

10. Icinga

Another popular open monitoring system that checks hosts and services and reports their status to the administrator. As a fork of Nagios, Icinga is compatible with it and they have a lot in common.

11. OpsView

OpsView was originally free. Now, unfortunately, users of this monitoring system have to shell out money.

Op5 is another open source monitoring system. Plotting, storing and collecting data.

Alternatives to Nagios

Open source software for monitoring and tracking the status of various computer network services, servers and network equipment, used to obtain data on processor load, network usage, disk space and the like.

14. Munin

A good monitoring system that collects data from several servers simultaneously and displays everything in the form of graphs, with which you can track all past events on the server.

15.Zenoss

Written in Python using the Zope application server, data is stored in MySQL. With Zenoss you can
monitor network services, system resources, device performance, the Zenoss kernel analyzes the environment. This makes it possible to quickly understand a large number of specific devices.

16. Observium

A monitoring and surveillance system for network devices and servers, although the list of supported devices is huge and is not limited to network devices; the device must support SNMP.

17. Centreon

A comprehensive monitoring system allows you to monitor the entire infrastructure and applications containing system information. Free alternative to Nagios.

18. Ganglia

Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system used in high-performance computing systems such as clusters and grids. Monitors statistics and computation history in real time for each of the monitored nodes.

19. Pandora FMS

Monitoring system, good productivity and scalability, one monitoring server can monitor the work of several thousand hosts.

20. NetXMS

Open source software for monitoring computer systems and networks.

21.OpenNMS

OpenNMS monitoring platform. Unlike Nagios, it supports SNMP, WMI and JMX.

22. HypericHQ

A component of the VMware vRealize Operations suite, it is used to monitor OS, middleware and applications in physical, virtual and cloud environments. Displays availability, performance, usage, events, logs, and changes at every level of the virtualization stack (from the vSphere hypervisor to guest OSes).

23. Bosun

Open source monitoring and alert system from StackExchange. Bosun has a well-thought-out data design, as well as a powerful language for processing it.

24. Sensu

Sensu is an open source alert system similar to Nagios. There is a simple dashboard, you can see a list of clients, checks and triggered alerts. The framework provides the mechanisms needed to collect and accumulate server operation statistics. Each server runs a Sensu agent (client) that uses a set of scripts to check the functionality of services, their status and collect any other information.

25. CollectM

CollectM collects statistics about system resource usage every 10 seconds. It can collect statistics for several hosts and send it to the server, the information is displayed using graphs.

28. Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool

34. Total Network Monitor

This is a program for constantly monitoring the operation of a local network of individual computers, network and system services. Total Network Monitor generates a report and notifies you about errors that have occurred. You can check any aspect of the operation of a service, server or file system: FTP, POP/SMTP, HTTP, IMAP, Registry, Event Log, Service State and others.

35. PRTG

38.Idera

Supports multiple operating systems and virtualization technologies. There are many free tools that you can use to monitor your system.

39. PowerAdmin

PowerAdmin is a commercial monitoring solution.

40. ELM Enterprise Manager

ELM Enterprise Manager - complete monitoring from “what happened” to “what is happening” in real time. Monitoring tools in ELM include - Event Collector, Performance Monitor, Service Monitor, Process Monitor, File Monitor, PING Monitor.

41.EventsEntry

42. Veeam ONE

A powerful solution for monitoring, reporting, and scheduling resources across VMware, Hyper-V, and Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure, monitors the health of your IT infrastructure and diagnoses problems before they impact your user experience.

43. CA Unified Infrastructure Management (formerly CA Nimsoft Monitor, Unicenter)

Monitors the performance and availability of Windows server resources.

44. HP Operations Manager

This infrastructure monitoring software performs proactive root cause analysis, reducing recovery time and reducing operations management costs. The solution is ideal for automated monitoring.

45.Dell OpenManage

OpenManage (now Dell Enterprise Systems Management) is an all-in-one monitoring product.

46. ​​Halcyon Windows Server Manager

Management and monitoring of networks, applications and infrastructure.

Below is a list of (most popular) network monitoring tools

55.NeDi

Nedi is an open source network monitoring tool.

54. The Dude

The Dude monitoring system, although free, is, according to experts, in no way inferior to commercial products; it monitors individual servers, networks and network services.

55.BandwidthD

Open source program.

56. NagVis

An extension for Nagios that allows you to create infrastructure maps and display their status. NagVis supports a large number of different widgets and icon sets.

57. Proc Net Monitor

A free monitoring application that allows you to track all active processes and, if necessary, quickly stop them to reduce the load on the processor.

58. PingPlotter

Used to diagnose IP networks, it allows you to determine where losses and delays of network packets occur.

Small but useful tools

60. Glint Computer Activity Monitor

61.RealTemp

A utility for monitoring temperatures of Intel processors, it does not require installation; it tracks the current, minimum and maximum temperature values ​​for each core and the start of throttling.

62. SpeedFan

A utility that allows you to control the temperature and fan speeds in the system, monitors the performance of sensors on the motherboard, video card and hard drives.

63.OpenHardwareMonitor