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Thursday 22 July 2010

How to monitor for when an application terminates

I have had an application that needs to run on a SBS 2008 Server as an interactive user, the application runs from a mapped network drive and then runs from the system tray.

If the application is running it works fine, but it will on occasion terminate with no error, this means that emails do not get sent from the clients workstations and it can be hours before it is noted that the application is not running.

So I decided I needed to know if this application closes or terminates, I could then restart the application automatically and know that my users can still send emails.

I started by looking to see if I could run the application as a service so I did not need the server logged on with an interactive user, I used the SRVANY.EXE application from the Windows 2003 Resource Kit and then created a service using SC.EXE and set this to run my application as local system and interactive with the desktop.

This did run the service but the application did not load into the desktop and as a result did not work so I decided this was not the solution.

Next I looked for an application that would monitor a process and then alert when this occurred, I found Application Monitor here



This allows you to specify the application you want to monitor, how often it checks to see if it is running and then will restart the application if it detects that it is not running. I quickly setup the EXE as a check and tested by closing the application manually and the Application Monitor restarted the application!

There is no event log monitoring which would have been nice for our Managed Services application that could have notified our helpdesk, but it does work for a quick fix!

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