Process Monitor
- OS:
🪐 Platform-independent
The Process Monitor watches running OS processes and reports system activity as long as matching processes are alive and busy. Each <Process> entry defines a logical group: the text node is a regular expression matched against process image names, and enabling watchChildren extends the group to include any processes spawned by a match. This makes it straightforward to track browsers or IDE families where work happens across several child processes under a common parent.
Optionally, activity thresholds can be configured so that processes that are running but idle — sitting in the background with negligible activity — do not prevent sleep: CPU (minCPU), GPU (minGPU), storage IO (minIO), and per-process network traffic (minTraffic), where supported by the platform. The watch expression combines their Boolean results with and, or, and parentheses. Once the expression becomes false, the onIdle event fires for that group. onStart and onStop fire when the first process in a group appears or the last one exits.
The available actions cover forceful process termination with an optional graceful shutdown timeout. The configuration reference documents all attributes. How Desomnia learns about process changes differs per platform — ETW event notifications on Windows, a native kernel enumeration on macOS and Linux, and generic polling elsewhere; the performance page explains the difference and how to configure the poll interval if needed.