Tuesday, July 29, 2014

How to find the processes running on a remote server AND how to find the services associated with svchost.exe.

We had a server which was running at 100% cpu utilization.  Unfortunately,
we were unable to RDP into the server to identiify the offending process.

To get the process details of a remote server, I used PsList.exe.  PSList is a part of a suite of tools which can be downloaded here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896649.aspx


In this case, it was svchost.exe.   Since there can be multiple svchost processes running, take note of the Process ID (Pid).   svchost.exe can contain other individual services.  To find out what they are, use tasklist and match up the PID to the offending service.  (In this case 924)

tasklist /s myserver /svc /fi "imagename eq svchost.exe"