How to monitor Windows services

windows-services monitoring
Craig HB picture Craig HB · Nov 17, 2008 · Viewed 94.5k times · Source

I'm looking for a way to monitor certain Windows services (on Windows Server 2003) and restart if necessary. The services are on different servers and include mainly SQL Server services (e.g. SQL Server Agent), but also some proprietary services.

Email alerts sent out if a service has stopped would be very useful as well.

Answer

Tomalak picture Tomalak · Nov 17, 2008

A "might be enough" version of this is built into Windows. Look into the "Recovery" tab of the service properties, as available via services.msc.

You can act on a service fail with:

  • "Restart the Service"
  • "Run a Progam"
  • "Restart the Computer"

"Run a program" could be a small script that sends a mail, for example.

If you want a bigger solution with an overview dashboard and all, there are plenty of system monitoring solutions available. For example SolarWinds IPMonitor comes to mind, or Nagios, or Cacti.

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