windows administration - setting up alerts/emails for failed windows services

Question

What are some best practices, tools sets within the Windows 2003 server that I can utilize to monitor failed application services?

We basically have some 3party software that has a few services that it runs. I also want to be notified if the IIS server goes down as well.

I am not interested in obtaining other software for this. If I have to figure out and script in, I would rather do it that way.

Thanks for your input.

Answer 1

IMHO the best way to do this given the constraints you mention is eventtriggers.exe.

You create a trigger for the event you want to monitor, which then calls a mailer script of some kind.

Look at this excellent article for more details.

and the technet article.

Answer 2

You can script the Windows WMI monitors, see for example

http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Documentation/Nagios-XI-Documentation/Monitoring-Windows-With-WMI/details