How to create an automated way of monitoring to see if this application is running

Question

We have a application that should always be running. Does anyone know of a way to create an automated way of monitoring to see if this application is running (possibly using a batch file)? If it is not running, then send an email notification and start the application?

Answer 1

You don't mention an OS but if you're looking for something on Windows, Application Monitor might be a good start.

If you're on Linux, monit look pretty useful.

Answer 2

Nagios is generally what's used by systems administrators that I've come across. You can script it to do whatever check you need and alert based on a variety of conditions. Works well with cacti so you can graph stuff too :)

If you want to ensure that your service always restarts should it die you could use supervise from daemontools.

Answer 3

Most monitoring systems have a built-in test which watches the process list to check that everything that should be running is running.

We use Hobbit, it has a configurable table of processes which should be running (and the number of instances, red/yellow alert etc).

Answer 4

Alternative to Nagios is zabbix

Answer 5

We are now heading to release our service that can do some monitoring tasks that usually are hard to handle by Nagios or other similar tools. We provide instant notifications (email, SMS) when:

a) your application/service does not respond for some time

b) some conditions are met (e.g. time of execution of some part of logic > X, number of emails sent < Y or whatever you want)

This is absoltely easy to use when compared to Nagios or others and it does not require installation. We spent a lot of time to make it user-friendly

As I mentioned this will be released very soon (will come back and give you the information). If you are interested in our approach we invite you to beta tests of our application (there will be some promotion for participants).