Service availability monitoring

A server exists to provide services, and if those services stop working correctly, problems ensue. ServerAssist goes beyond the service checking provided as part of Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 by providing active and passive monitoring capabilities.

ServerAssist checks key services, to ensure that they are running, and responds if they fail. Once per minute, all monitored services are individually checked, and if one of them is found to be not running, it can be restarted automatically. If the service does not restart cleanly, optionally the machine can be automatically rebooted in order to resolve the problem.

Sometimes, custom components used on a web server can consume resources and eventually cause the web server to fail, although the World Wide Web Publishing Service itself is still running. To combat this situation, further checking is performed on the web server itself. Once per minute, ServerAssist requests a page from the web server, and compare the contents of the page to a file. If the page and file differ, ServerAssist will stop and restart not only the web server, but all the related services, such as the FTP Publishing Service and the IISAdmin Service. Once restarted, the page is checked again, and if it still differs from the file, the machine can be rebooted automatically.

By default, the page used to perform the check is a simple ASP script that contains sufficient functionality to ensure that the ASP engine is operating correctly. The page can be extended in any way appropriate to provide further checks, for example to ensure that a database can be queried successfully.