Nagios Support Forum

Looking for a way to monitor for the program running on a Windows system. The program is an executable called client.exe that loads into memory as a process when running. I have tried turning the process into a service with no luck.

While I can monitor for the process count I need to monitor weather or not the process is running and present a "critical" notification if the process is not running.

Hello @meekimouse,

You can monitor a process with NCPA. I would recommend using check_ncpa.py with the NCPA API's processes endpoint. Through the NCPA UI, you can verify that your query is correctly grabbing the right process and then use check_ncpa.py for your checks.

Here are some useful links:
https://support.nagios.com/kb/article.php?id=782
https://www.nagios.org/ncpa/help.php

Hi friend, I just tell you the simplest and most reliable approach is to monitor whether client.exe is actually running in memory by checking for the existence of the process itself and triggering a critical alert if it is not found. This can be done by querying running processes by name (for example with a small PowerShell or command-line check) rather than relying on process count, since you only care about whether it is present or absent. Service wrappers often fail because many applications aren’t designed to run as Windows services and may require a user session or UI, so avoiding that complexity is usually the correct choice.