Monitoring a process in Windows

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+2 Q:

Monitoring a process in Windows

How can I monitor a Windows process and start it up if it is not running? I'd like to have something that starts up as a Windows service and can handle multiple processes.

EDIT: Hopefully there's a ready to use library/component I can use and just tweak or configure instead of having to implement it from scratch. I know in the *nix world of two popular packages: god and monit.

+3 A:

You can create a Windows Service that just watches the current process list.

EnumProcesses provides the means of seeing processes running currently. There are many APIs available to start a new process, including:

system()
_exec()
WinExec()
ShellExecute()/ShellExecuteEx()
CreateProcess()
CreateProcessAsUser()
CreateProcessWithLogonW()

If you're using other languages/frameworks, they often provide their own wrappers around the above.

Reed Copsey 2009-08-13 21:47:48

Do you know of anything that already does this (instead of having to reinvent the wheel)?

Abdullah Jibaly 2009-08-14 02:12:14

No. However, it's pretty simple to do this in .NET languages - you can make a service that does this with probably <50 lines of code. (Most of the above functions have high level wrappers in the System.Diagnostics namespace, like the Process class, which makes this trivial.)

Reed Copsey 2009-08-14 16:30:41

Hi Abdullah.

Re: existing applications, you may want to check out AlwaysUp. It is designed to keep a process running 24/7 (restarting it if it fails) and has a few advanced features that may be time-consuming to reproduce in your own code.

Good luck.

CoreTech 2010-07-23 23:18:12

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Monitoring a process in Windows

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