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Monitoring Services in MOM

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There are four ways this can be done in MOM 

1.      It's happening anyway (part 1)!
This is such an obvious requirement for most administrators that it is built into the agent functionality. So without having to do anything other than install the agent with default settings, your server will be having all its services sampled every ten minutes and the result reported once per hour. 
You can configure this through the Agent properties under MOM Console\Configuration\Global Settings\Agent or for a particular agent through Mom Console\Configuration\Agent Managers\<your agent manager>\Properties\Managed Computers\<your managed computer>\Settings 
This provides a kind of health check overview and reports the results as 'Other Events' Look for event ID 21225. There is also a standard report available through MOM Reporting that displays service uptime statistics. 

 

2.      It's happening anyway (part 2)!
The Base Management pack always installed with MOM includes the processing rule group "Default Event Collection for Microsoft Windows NT and 2000" which contains rules that will automatically collect all entries in the system event log where service stops and starts are recorded. These will show up in the MOM console under Monitor\All Windows NT Events". You can create your own Event or Alert Processing rule to watch for these event ID's (1003 = stopped, 1001 = Started) where the source is <the name of the service>. 

 

3.      MOM Script 'Service Check Status'
If you need something more immediate you can use the MOM script 'Service Check Status' which takes three parameters: 

NumAttempts                     - the number of attempts to contact the service before giving up
NumSecsBetweenRetries    - time between retries in seconds
ServiceName                      - The Registry key as it appears in HKLM\System\CCS\Services
 
Use a timed data provider (e.g. 'every 15 minutes') to run the script on the target server. An example of how to use this is can be seen in the following Processing Rule installed with the terminal services Management Pack supplied with Mom: 

Microsoft Windows Terminal Server
      WTS NT 4.0
            WTS NT 4.0 Shared Scripts 
                 WTS Shared Scripts 
                      Event Processing Rules 
                            Check Service Availability 

This rule fires every 17 minutes and raises an event reporting the state of the WTS service. Other processing rules in the same group watch for this event and generate alerts accordingly. 

 

4.      MOM WMI Event Provider
For high octane instant results you can create your own WMI Event provider using the following syntax:

 Name: 

 <your name>

 Namespace:

 root\cimv2

 Query:

 "Select * from __instanceModificationEvent Within 5 Where targetInstance ISA  'Win32_Service' And targetInstance.name = '<the short name of the service>' "

 Property List:

  leave blank 

5.     
Use this provider as the basis for an Event or Alert processing rule. This rule will create an alert whenever there is a change to the state of the service. You could even run a script as the automatic response to re-star the service.

6.      Notice though that this query polls the WMI class every 5 seconds ('Within 5') to see if there has been a change.  This could add a significant overhead to WMI, which you could reduce by decreasing the frequency.  Also note that if the 'Windows Management Instrumentation' service is bounced for any reason, the monitoring process is killed.  To reset it the agent must also be bounced.