The utilities available with the operating system or available from third parties are often very useful in providing additional information that can complete the diagnostic picture or indeed identify specific problems directly, for example, with the environment setup or network.
For Windows environments : You might need to obtain additional tools to those included in your operating system. In particular, a suite of tools originally supplied by Sysinternals.com and now distributed by Microsoft include most of the useful tools, for example, procmon).
For UNIX environments : Tools such as strace and truss might be provided as optional installation components, or are otherwise available for download and installation.
The following external utilities have proved useful in providing supporting information when a problem occurs, or in investigating problems that would be exposed directly to the operating system:
For Windows environments
This particularly useful tool is part of the Windows SysInternals suite of tools, which you can download from the Microsoft Web site. ProcMon shows path and registry accesses and searches that have been performed across your system. You can view all accesses and searches, or filter them to show specific information.
For an example using ProdMon to troubleshoot the generation of a core file, see Troubleshooting Scenarios using Third-party Diagnostics.
For UNIX environments