At work we have a Windows Service which is critical to the business. Last night this service failed but us in the IT Department weren't aware until this morning that the service had failed. Does anyone know of a program (or a built Windows Server 2003 process) whereby if a specific service fails an email or text message alert can be sent out automatically?

I have googled this to death but cannot find anything useful does anyone have any ideas?

Cheers in advance

hiya,

not sure to be honest, guess it depends on what kind of program it is.

Probably some insanely complicated way of doing it ha.

Tom

I'll forward this onto our I.T Technical Department and see if they know mate.

We have similar stuff where I work but I think its mostly bespoke kit.

I think the problem that you might have is that you need a trigger to tell you that its not working. Not sure what it is that failed, but you should be able to either monitor program activity passivly or activly throw data at the program and monitor the response?

Another sure fire way to fix the problem is to ditch windows for critical business applications

Working as a Software Developer, im not too sure on Systems Admin/Network side of this but there are software kits out there to do this, you just need to find them... also alot of it is bespoke and coded into the actual program... ditch windows as its crap... to get something decent it would require a bit of funds!!! Unfortunatley nothing comes for free.

I agree with scotty on this on - nothing in life comes for free or if it does its gnerally crap and will cost you more in the long run.

I'm not in IT or software development but do work with installing bespoke software for our business and I always insist that it has health checking built in from the start.

If it truely is business critical then fork out some cash on getting the correct bit of software written for you - any off the shelf product will be a bit half arsed and will most likely not fit in with your current busniss processes.

Work out how much money you just lost in the last system failure, times this by an estimated failures per year and use this as justification for the expense buying the solution.

edit - oh, and as said before..... ditch windows and get a linux/unix system; you won't need health monitoring software as they never fail!

I'd like to thank everyone who replied, we still haven't found solution so all comments gratefully received

and yes ditch windows for critical things, we have got a linux workstation in house for testing however nothing has ever really come of it.

Cheers guys