Which Windows service should you monitor?

The answer to which Windows service should you monitor seems easy. Unfortunately it is a bit more complicated.

“All of them” is not correct as a service can be disabled or set to start manually.

You want to monitor all services that are expected to be running.

So a safe bet which should capture the majority of the services you expect to be running is to monitor if all services which are configured to start automatically are actually running.

While this seems a logical approach it is unfortunate that there are quite a few Windows services set to start running automatically shutdown after startup by design.

So you need to accommodate your monitoring to ignore these services.

volatile services

An intriguing phenomenon is the existence of volatile services, which are only created when a user logs on, either locally or remotely via RDP. It's essential to consider these services as well.

Out of the box solution

Fortunately InfraSonar has an out of the box solution for monitoring Windows services which is constantly updated from learnings so you don’t need to worry about getting false positive alerts or even worse missing vital services go down without you noticing.

Get notified when services are added or removed

Also worth mentioning is InfraSonar’s ability to track changes in the list of Windows services. This allows you to be notified if services are added or removed.