Plug-and-Play Monitor

Plug-and-Play Monitor is a portable application that monitors your ports and shows notifications whenever a device is plugged into the computer and automatically identified by Windows. It lets you analyze log details and print or export them to plain text documents for closer examination. You can use it to find potential plug-and-play issues, for example.

Portable tool with a simple UI

You can drop the program files in any part of the hard disk or on a removable storage unit and double-click the .exe to launch it on any computer with minimum effort. It doesn't change Windows registry settings.
It's packed in a clear-cut interface made from a large window with a plain look, which displays all log details, namely the time and type of each event, such as the device path, friendly name, description, manufacturer, category, and device setup class.

Enable notifications for PnP devices

Port and volume notifications are auto-enabled and they cannot be deactivated. However, you can turn on alerts for devices and test Plug-and-Play Monitor by connecting something into the PC, such as a pen drive. Log information can be printed or saved to file as plain text documents.

Evaluation results and observations

It quickly reacted to plug-and-play events during our tests and displayed accurate information. Unsurprisingly, it didn't hog system resources. No error dialogs popped up and it didn't hang or crash.
On the other hand, it doesn't implement an option for minimizing to the systray to become non-intrusive while you carry on with your normal PC activity; it can only be minimized to the taskbar.

Conclusion

To sum it up, Plug-and-Play Monitor offers a simple solution to help you monitor PnP events for any devices auto-detected by the operating system, as well as to print or save log details to file.