New in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Resource Monitor is a powerful tool for understanding how your system resources are used by processes and services. In addition to monitoring resource usage in real time, Resource Monitor can help you analyze unresponsive processes, identify which applications are using files, and control processes and services.

There are so many things you can do with the Resource Monitor!  I’ve used it to identify stuck programs/processes, programs/processes that are using too many resources, and even list the ip addresses a network application is connected to!

To bring up the Resource Monitor, simply type resmon.exe in the Start Menu Search Box, and hit enter.

Resource Monitor always starts in the same location and with the same display options as the previous session. However, at any time you can save your display state including window size, column widths, optional columns, expanded tables, and the active tab. You can then open the configuration file to use the saved settings.

Tabs

Resource Monitor includes five tabs: Overview, CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network. The Overview tab displays basic system resource usage information; the other tabs display information about each specific resource.

• Switch between tabs by clicking on the tab titles.
• If you have filtered results on one tab, only resources used by the selected processes or services will be displayed on the other tabs. Filtered results are denoted by an orange bar below the title bar of each table. To stop filtering results while viewing the current tab, in the key table, clear the check box next to Image.

Identify Resource Consumers

In Windows Resource Monitor, you can sort table data by any column to help you identify which processes are using which resources. The following procedures describe how to complete some common troubleshooting tasks using Resource Monitor.

To identify the process with the highest current CPU usage

1. Click the CPU tab.

2. In Processes, click CPU to sort processes by current CPU resource consumption.

To identify the network address that a process is connected to

1. Click the Network tab, and then click the title bar of TCP Connections to expand the table.

2. Locate the process whose network connection you want to identify. If there are a large number of entries in the table, you can click Image to sort by executable file name.

3. Review the Remote Address and Remote Port columns to see which network address and port the process is connected to.

• Click the Disk tab, and then click the title bar of Storage to expand the table. The Available Space column displays the amount of free space, in megabytes (MB), for each physical disk on the system.

1. Click the Memory tab.

2. In Physical Memory, review the Available to Programs value. Available memory is the combined total of standby memory and free memory. Free memory includes zero page memory.