Monitoring a windows service

How do you want to determine whether the service is up or not? Is it a service that answers on a TCP or UDP port? If so, it would be relatively simple to configure a health monitor to poll the server:port to see if it's listening. You can configure the LTM monitoring daemon, bigd, to send a specific string and expect a string in the response. If the service can't be checked with a standard TCP or UDP request, can you provide more detail on how you would want to verify the service is up? You could potentially write an external monitor that calls a script which performs the check from the LTM.

 

 

Aaron

Since it's a web service it should not be too difficult to create a web page that is part of the service that returns a certain string/code when the service it functioning properly. We have pages like this that go through a number of steps to verify all is well (e.g. connect to database, retrieve record, etc.).

 

 

You can then call this page from the LTM and look for this string. Handy for non-LTM based monitoring as well (e.g. Nagios) so you can be alerted when services are down.

Building on tammelaj's suggestion, you could create an .asp page that runs the appropriate system commands to verify the service in question. For example, this page: (Click here) details the steps you'd want to take to check & verify Oracle windows services.

 

 

While you might possibly be able to craft an external monitor to perform the same operations, it's much more efficient for both systems to perform the checks locally then report the results to the calling system. And it will come in handy for other remote monitoring applications as tammelaj also mentions.

 

 

/deb

I have the same question plagueing me (monitoring a windows service), but it's not a web service. It's Microsoft Exchange. My mail group wants me to monitor the state of the Exchange server's "windows service" to know when to fail over to a backup server (actually to a backup datacenter via GTMs, but the concept should be the same, eh?). They can't give me a TCP or UDP port to scan for that's tied to the "Exchange email" service. It doesn't listen on port 25 (gosh, that would have been easy). I had thought I might be able to do it with a WMI monitor, but reading the config guide, it appears that the WMI commands available in a monitor are a subset of WMI, and only include those which are usefull for measuring the performance of the windows server, not the up/down status of an individual process. Am I misunderstanding the limitations of WMI monitors or could they help in situations like mine, or the original question above?

 

 

-Darrell.

I wrote up a potential solution to this: http://links.f5.com/gqVlUe Click Here