c# - Process.StartTime Access Denied

Question

My code needs to determine how long a particular process has been running. But it continues to fail with an access denied error message on the Process.StartTime request. This is a process running with a User's credentials (ie, not a high-privilege process). There's clearly a security setting or a policy setting, or something that I need to twiddle with to fix this, as I can't believe the StartTime property is in the Framework just so that it can fail 100% of the time.

A Google search indicated that I could resolve this by adding the user whose credentials the querying code is running under to the "Performance Log Users" group. However, no such user group exists on this machine.

Answer 1

I've read something similar to what you said in the past, Lars. Unfortunately, I'm somewhat restricted with what I can do with the machine in question (in other words, I can't go creating user groups willy-nilly: it's a server, not just some random PC).

Thanks for the answers, Will and Lars. Unfortunately, they didn't solve my problem.

Ultimate solution to this is to use WMI:

using System.Management;
String queryString = "select CreationDate from Win32_Process where ProcessId='" + ProcessId + "'";
SelectQuery query = new SelectQuery(queryString);

ManagementScope scope = new System.Management.ManagementScope(@"\.
ootCIMV2");
ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(scope, query);
ManagementObjectCollection processes = searcher.Get();

    //... snip ... logic to figure out which of the processes in the collection is the right one goes here

DateTime startTime = ManagementDateTimeConverter.ToDateTime(processes[0]["CreationDate"].ToString());
TimeSpan uptime = DateTime.Now.Subtract(startTime);

Parts of this were scraped from Code Project:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/win32processusingwmi.aspx

And "Hey, Scripting Guy!":

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/qanda/jul05/hey0720.mspx