Utility to Monitor Kill / Restart Rogue Process?

I need a Windows (XP/7) utility to continuously monitor always-running processes and kill them (and optionally restart them) if they hang.

There are a lot of interactive tools out there (Sysinternals, most notably). But I have a program on a little-used workstation that needs to run continuously and reliably, both of which are not two of its strong suits :) It requires continual babysitting, and I'd rather just have a monitoring utility (even a paid one) that can kill/restart it on definable conditions -- e.g. CPU > 80%, Status of "Not Responding", etc.

Sean O

Posted 2010-05-11T19:37:47.680

Reputation: 820

I see this question every single day! Are you spamming and deleting it or is this just a really hot topic? – marcusw – 2010-05-11T21:04:30.553

I've done searches and found similar questions. But nothing quite like what I need. – Sean O – 2010-05-12T12:47:05.040

Answers

I've come across a utility that does ~90% of what I need: Kiwi Application Monitor, that can kill/restart processes that consumer too much memory/CPU time.

Sean O

Posted 2010-05-11T19:37:47.680

Reputation: 820

The light version of IPSentry might do the trick, you can pick and choose what features you want to buy: http://www.ipsentry.com/

On the other hand, how do you determine if the program is running? You might be able to solve this very specific problem with a VB script that runs as a scheduled task every few minutes or so to check the system and restart the program if needed. Here's an example of someone doing something similar (albeit with a very different end goal): www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=395765

matt

Posted 2010-05-11T19:37:47.680

Reputation: 1

Matt, Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, it looks like IP Sentry performs lots of monitoring, except application monitoring. The tek-tips thread looks interesting... I wonder if PowerShell can do something similar, and more simply :) – Sean O – 2010-05-12T13:02:48.370