Is there a way to monitor a Windows service and alert people when it hangs/stops?

Question

We have a service running on a Windows Server 2003 machine. This service watches a particular folder on an FTP server, and when files appear there, it invokes one of a few different executables to process them.

I've been asked to find a way for staff to be alerted in some way when this service hangs or stops.

Can anyone suggest anything with just this much information? If not, what else would you need to know?

Seems we could write ANOTHER service to watch THIS service, but then there's a chance THAT one would stop ... so we haven't resolved anything.

Answer 1

About the only thing that I know if is writing another application or service that monitors if that service is running; something like that shouldn't have any unexpected behavior and stop, hopefully.

Another thing to do is go to the service in Windows, go to its properties, and then go to recovery options. From here, you can set the behavior of a service if it is to fail. The options in Windows 7 are to restart the service or computer, or run a program. This program could send some sort of notification. However, I don't know if any or all of these options exist in Server 2003. This would also not likely work if the service were to just hang, but a service watching it probably wouldn't either.

Also, if you have the source code, you can override some of the service-related methods such as OnStop() (for C#) to send a notification, but I don't believe this works with a failure.

My personal choice would be to set the recovery options just to restart the service on failure, unless it repeatedly fails, which there is also an option for. But just do what you think will work best for you; there isn't really a fail-safe method to do it.

UPDATE: I did check, and Server 2003 does indeed have the same recovery options in the service manager. As the guys said above, you can deal with that, but it is only in C++ from what I have seen; there is also a command prompt way to do it:

sc failure [servicename] reset= 0 actions= restart/60000

I found that command here and you can look at it more in its MSDN documentation. You could call this command from C# or other languages if you are not using C++, or use it directly from the command prompt if you do not have the source code.