monitoring "manual" windows services

[MichielvM]

Hi guys,

This post is not a problem, just an open discussion (if this needs to be posted elsewhere please let me know)

The question is this: An administrator wants to monitor a windows service which is in a Manual state instead of Automatic.
(in this particular case the service is controlled by another application)

My input would be not to monitor it at all, because you just can't tell whether the service went down intentionally and also when it will be up again.
Does anyone have any experience with this?

[sreinhardt]

I agree that there is not a great way to determine, without sifting through event logs, how or why a service stopped. You could create a service for the secondary one, that this depends on on the windows server, and set the currently requested service as a dependent of the one not being requested to be monitored. At least this way, you can make sure not to get alerts for the manual service when the other service is down. Might that suite what you are looking for?

[MichielvM]

In my case it's a citrix server controlling a printer service on demand.
Citrix start/stops the spooler service as needed.

The Citrix services are monitored already.
IMHO there's really no reason or way to monitor this.

[scottwilkerson]

You could use the negate plugin to check that it is not running, basically giving the reverse of normal
http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagi ... ios-XI.pdf

[WillemDH]

If you know how the Citrix server stops the service, or which eventlog, or registry is changed, you could write a wrapper Powershell script somehow which will only alert when the print spooler service is down when it is not stopped by Citrix.

Grtz

[abrist]

Any word OP?