The control of CVD processes requires in situ analysis techniques and real time monitoring to identify the chemical species involved in the mechanism, to determine the growth kinetics and more generally to detect and analyze the dynamics of any event occurring during the growth of the film. We demonstrate through four representative examples that IR pyrometry allows to answer to the last two items, which make it an attractive diagnostic tool for CVD processes, simple to use, sensitive at nanometric scale, economic and being able to operate either under atmospheric or low pressure. Thus, we monitored the initial stages of the growth of conducting diffusion barriers CrCxNy on Si and as a second example, we have followed their heat treatment to detect possible phase transformations. The case of MOCVD of Fe reveals the high sensitivity of this diagnostic technique. Indeed, the abrupt changes of the pyrometric signal correlate remarkably to changes in the growth mode. Lastly, the characteristic oscillations due to multireflexions at the interfaces observed in the first stages of the growth of transparent TiO2 film allow the real time determination of the growth rate. These examples show the great diagnostic potentialities of IR pyrometry for the optimization and the control of CVD processes. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.