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We currently provide patch management as a service to a large number of servers. Historically, we have had tier 1 type technicians RDP to each machine after the patching window to verify they are online. We are quickly outgrowing this method of verification. We have a very robust monitoring system which mainly utilizes SNMP. It is capable of ping, snmp, process, service, tcp port etc. type monitoring.

My question is what would everyone recommend we monitor to guarantee a Windows server is online and not hung on reboot or shutdown? I am hesitant to change our policy to rely only on monitoring until I am comfortable that the classic "hang on shutdown" type windows update issue can be successfully monitored against. As an example, when a server patches and hangs while rebooting but is still responding to ping, and possibly certain services would still check in via SNMP as running. Has anyone set up a monitoring policy which is capable of alerting in these scenarios? Are there recommended Windows services, processes, or ports that I could monitor? The types of servers run the gamut, so I am looking for any generic Windows type processes that we could monitor.

Any help is appreciated!

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There's always a chance that a server will hang in such a way as to not be detected by your monitoring system regardless of what you choose to monitor. I might suggest that you monitor the typical components such as disk, network availability, key services (based on the Roles installed on each individual server), etc. The combination of these should be enough that if a server hangs, one of the monitored components will trigger an alert.

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