Program to monitor other programs?

bwillford

Hey guys hopefully someone here can help me with my current dilemma. I am trying to find a program that could somehow alert me when a different program fails/errors/closes out. Let me try to explain.

Windows XP computer running 3 programs 24/7. I need these programs up and running 24/7. I am trying to find a way for the computer to alert me if one of the programs get an error, someone closes one of them, or the program crashes.

Do you know of any application monitoring programs that can run on this computer and alert me if one of them closes either by email, text, or phone call?

Thanks!

DevilWAH

Process Monitor 2.1 soem thing like this (jsut monitor the process to see if it is running)

you can also get eventlog to syslog, where any events can be set to send a syslog message to a central managment server, whcih will then email/alert you.

I sugguest you look for applications that monitor processes, there are lots out there from freeware up through corprate level very expensive systems.

PS for email alert unless our workstation has an smtp server configured, you will need an smtp enabled email server i can connect to.

Also remember that if this application crashes its self it wont alert you. there are others that run from a 2nd computer and check across the network. It all depends how much you want to spend and how important it is.

Mutiny.com is a network application that can do the same thing and monitors remotly, but is normaly used to monitor lots of se4rvers/networkdevices.

Which leads on to another option, enabeling snmp on the client machine and using an SNMP to get the status of he process remotly.

As you can see lots of ways to do this. but all rely on monitoring the processes that are running. (Or for errors the event logs)

hope that helps

sambuca69

You could script something to watch for a process to die and then email you. Not sure of your background

Windows PowerShell 2.0 - WMI Event Monitoring

blargoe

I've never tried this but you should be able to cobble something together using Powershell... maybe something like using get-process to return whether an instance of the executable is running.

If your server environment is using SCOM for monitoring, it has the capability to do exactly what you're looking for, and will work on XP.

azjag

DevilWAH wrote: »

Process Monitor 2.1 something like this (just monitor the process to see if it is running)

I second this or if you feel exceptionally techy put a Nagios server out there and configure it to monitor and report.

DevilWAH

sambuca69 wrote: »

You could script something to watch for a process to die and then email you. Not sure of your background

Windows PowerShell 2.0 - WMI Event Monitoring

Indeed if you know scripting there is plenty of methods to do this, and you can find loads of code snipits for sending emails via script on the net.

But do remember and script you run on the client machine is subject to fail jsut like the application you are trying to monitor.

You either need to monitor remotely from another device that its self is monitored.

or set up the script / application to update you that the service is alive as well as when it fails. This way if the whole client machine falls over and stops sending alerts you will be alerted to this as well by the absence of a message.