Windows Process Age

[dcharles]

Hello, I'm not sure if this question has been asked before, but I was wondering if it was possible to use the check_procs plugin to check specific attributes for a Windows process. In our case, we are trying to determine if a certain Windows process is running for over a specific length of time. In this case, we are checking how long EXCEL is open on that host. I am using these parameters:

–w 300 –c 360 -a "~.*EXCEL.EXE" –metric=ELAPSED.

The reason I ask this is that it seems that check_procs is designed more for checking processes on Linux hosts. Please excuse my confusion.
We are running check_mk with this set as a legacy check on CentOS 6.4 with check_procs v1.4.15.

Thanks for your help

[sreinhardt]

I may be mistaken, however I believe check_procs is linux specific. You certainly could do it with windows performance counters though and nsclient or another windows agent.

[dcharles]

I'm not sure if that's a viable option, as we already have Nagios set up with Check_mk, which is working for my organization, for the most part. We're just looking into investigating whether it was possible to either add a legacy check that can tell us if a certain process is running for a specified amount of time, or utilizing check_mk for that purpose. I've been doing some searching and haven't been able to find anything so far that can provide this for us in our current environment.

[lmiltchev]

You can try using the check_mk windows agent (check_mk_agent.exe):

http://mathias-kettner.de/checkmk_windows.html

I haven't tried it, and I am not sure if it will do the job for you, but on the page it says:

Furthermore checks can be added by making use of external plugins written in VBS, command or other languages.

So if you really would like to use check_mk, you could add a custom script for monitoring the windows process age and call it with check_mk.

[dcharles]

Yes, we have the check_mk agent installed on all of our Windows hosts and we use that to monitor different attributes of the particular host. This looks like it might be beneficial for what we're trying to do, so I'll look into it further.

Thanks everyone for such a quick response. Also, has anyone else ever been able to do this successfully?

[slansing]

Yeah as stated above its a little difficult to get that information from a Windows process unless you custom script a solution yourself. I'm interested to see how checkmk_windows works out for you.