After weeks of work, I am happy to announce the new release of wtrace. The 3.0 version is a complete rewrite, with many fixes and new features.

One of the most significant changes is the possibility to collect traces system-wide. If you don’t provide a file path or PID, wtrace will trace all the processes. To keep the number of trace events acceptable, consider using one of the extensive filtering options (a new feature, too!).

You may also choose the event handlers for each session. The sensible default set includes process, file, RPC, and TCP handlers. The 3.0 version introduces a Registry event handler, so if you enable it, you may trace Registry operations with wtrace! I plan to add handlers for less common event types in future releases, too.

The summary section got a new view that displays a process tree. When tracing system-wide or system-only, the tree includes all the running processes. In other modes, you will see the parent process and all its descendants.

The missing file paths are no longer a prevalent issue. And wtrace can finally run in a Windows container (thanks to updates in the TraceEvent library).

Unfortunately, I needed to drop support for ALPC and PowerShell events. In the previous versions of wtrace, I tried to match ALPC connections with the RPC ones, but it never worked reliably. Similarly, the PowerShell event handler had much to improve. I want to revive those handlers, but I need to be sure that they present accurate data. And that requires some more research.

Finally, wtrace has its homepage now: https://wtrace.net, and I hope that soon new utilities will join its Tools section.

Get the new version from the release page and start (w)tracing! 😃