ControlUp Disk Monitor helps you understand what’s taking up space on your machines and why, by providing visibility into disk usage and write behavior. Whether you're troubleshooting a full hard drive or optimizing Citrix performance, Disk Monitor offers an easy and automated way to identify the top disk writing processes and files. You can even use Disk Monitor to find out which process or files are causing high IOPS.
The Disk Monitor does not rely on VDI or Desktops (Edge DX) agents. The data is not displayed in app.controlup.com. But you can set up ControlUp triggers and scripts using data the Disk Monitor gathers.
This tool is experimental and therefore not officially supported by ControlUp Support.
Benefits
Disk Monitor continuously tracks which files are being written to your disk, using an efficient and lightweight method, Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). It's similar to running Process Monitor all the time, but smarter and without performance impact. You’ll receive regular reports showing:
- Which processes and which file write events are consuming the most disk space.
- What applications or users are writing the data.
Disk Monitor can catch unexpected cache growth, log file explosions, or hidden disk hogs - before they cause trouble.
Prerequisites
• Windows 10, 11, 2016, 2019, 2022, or 2025
• PowerShell 5
Disk Monitor is compatible with both ControlUp for VDI and ControlUp for Desktops but does not rely on either agents or monitors to function.
To install Disk Monitor, see here. To learn about Disk Monitor use cases, see here.
Performance impact
Disk Monitor is lightweight and efficient. On average, it uses:
• 0% - 0.2% CPU
• 20 - 100 MB of RAM
This minimal footprint ensures that Disk Monitor runs in the background without affecting user experience or system performance, even on resource-constrained endpoints.
Data collection and privacy
Disk Monitor logs its data to:
C:\ProgramData\ControlUp\DiskMonitor
By default, only administrators have access to this folder.
The following log files are generated:
- DiskIoActivityTracker.log. Main service log, 15 MB maximum, auto-rotating.
- ActivitiesSummaryYYYY-MM-DD.log. New file created daily, with a 5 minute rolling summary of the top 100 largest files written.
Data collected includes:
- write time
- file path
- process name
- user name
- file transfer size
By default, all logs stay local and are never uploaded to ControlUp. You can analyze logs using Script-Based Actions, and the data will be sent to ControlUp.
To enhance privacy, you can use specified parameters when installing to hide user names and file paths. For details, see here.