C# Processes on Remote Machine

Question

I wrote a monitoring service that keeps track of a set of processes, and notifies when the service is acting strange, running on high memory usage, exceeding CPU runtime etc.

This is working fine one my local computer, but I need it to point to remote machines and get the Process Information on these machines.

My approach, working on Local:

Process.GetProcesses().ToList().ForEach(p => MyProcesses.Add(p));

This gives me a collection of Processes on my machine, there is a lot more logic to it (filtering processes by name etc), but this is what it comes down to.

What I need:

Process.GetProcesses(machineName).ToList().ForEach(p => MyProcesses.Add(p));

This obviously complains about Access, the question is how can I pass credentials to somehow use this functionality?

Note: I have all of the machineNames and credentials needed to access these processes, but I need to supply this in a config file. I can run the Service in the specified username, but it still complains about access.

Why use separate accounts instead of creating one domain account for the service that has permissions to access all machines? This is infinitely safer than storing usernames and accounts — Panagiotis Kanavos
In our environment there are restrictions to certain machines, and only certain service Accounts can be used to access these — Johan Aspeling

Panagiotis Kanavos Panagiotis Kanavos · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-01T09:10:33

You need the GetProcesses(string) overload that accepts a target machine name, eg:

Process[] remoteAll = Process.GetProcesses("myComputer");

From the documentation example, you will see that the GetProcessBy methods also have overloads that accept a target name.

Under the hood, the Process class uses WMI to access management information like the list of processes.

For advanced scenarios it is probably better and faster to create a WMI query that will return the data you need, just like a database, instead of enumerating the remote process and extracting the data from each one.

C# Processes on Remote Machine

1 Answers