Long story short -- we have 2 webservers (IIS 6) that run a 3rd party asp.net application. Randomly (so far) they just...stop working. I have an outside check that will tell me when it stops working within a minute or so. Right now I have to get onto the machines through RDP and issue an iisreset. Which is fine until I'm not at a machine and I have to get to one PDQ.
I wrote a simple page that will issue an iisreset on the offending remote machine(s). This works, usually. Sometimes "iisrestart \machinename" will stop the IIS service, but not restart it, which is bad.
Ideally, I'd like to know if I can just stop the service, try to start it, and if it doesn't start in 10 seconds, try to start it again. But I don't know how to monitor the status of a service remotely.
Can someone point me in the right direction?