Using PortMon from SysInternals to Monitor Serial Connections

[scottalanmiller]

Microsoft provides PortMon from the SysInternals suite to allow you to monitor serial and parallel port communications on Windows going as far back as Windows 95! A very cool tool, indeed.

PortMon even works over a network having both a server and a client connection option. This can be extremely handy for remote troubleshooting.

However, it is important to note that on Windows 7 and later the application does not behave correctly and you need to know something about it. You need to manually start both the client and the server from the command line and connect them together. So here is how to run it...

First we need to start the client which runs headless in the background. You can make a shortcut for this if you do it often. But from CMD it is:

portmon /c

Wait for that to start then start the "server" component of PortMon. This can be done from the command line or by clicking on the icon.

portmon

Once the GUI starts up, hit Ctrl-R to enter the dialogue for connecting to the "remote" collector (which happens to be local.) Instead of entering an IP address, just enter localhost and you should be all set. Collection should start in a second.