Windows File/Folder monitoring

I have some folders where my client applications drop files into; sort of a inbox/dropbox. My application then sucks the files in for processing. One particular client creates a .pcl file and places it directly into the dropbox (as in there is no known queue or waiting that goes with it). And we're having problem somewhere along this area (we think.)

What I want to do is find some way to log the filename and date/time stamp for any of those files so that I can match those timestamps with logs in both the sending and receiving applications. Anyone know of a product or anything that could easily do that? I'd like to have this running before noon today if possible.

Do you have access to development software? You could write a simple program in VB.NET to monitor the folder and output changes to a log file. Running said program as a service would make it so you don't have to keep a cmd window open, or run a GUI while it does its thing.

Im curious, did you find a solution for this Adam?

Yes, I spent all day working on this and in meetings (still working on it, despite the meetings having nothing to do with it.)

I found that Process Monitor with the right filters worked great. I set it to only log actions taken in the particular directories I was concerned about and it showed everything down to the each packet adding to the file as it was being created before being absorbed by my app. It led me to believe that our server is just getting slammed with data at that particular time and just couldn't keep up. I'm doing move investigations today to find out if that is accurate.

If you're trying to gauge server performance you could try using process monitor (built into Windows Server) and take baseline readings; which you can record. From there set a scheduled task/trigger to have process monitor record specific system resource utilization records (i.e., hard faults/sec, disk usage, proc usage, etc...) during what you suspect to be a peak time. Compare that to your baseline readings and see what you get. It won't give you specific directories, but it is an easy way to confirm whether or not you server is being taxed; and at what time.

I think I found out what's going on yesterday. It's simply an issue with being dumped on faster than my application can process. The biggest problem we had was not knowing what time files were appearing in my folder since they were deleted once the app had them. The file spent a significant amount of time waiting for the previous document to process and I wanted to make sure it wasn't the OS or Network that was the cause. It looks like I might have to add threads to my app or redesign a more efficient process.