Now, I know it's usually that you want processes and the like to be up, which of course is no real problem setting up sensor for, but with our new PRTG installation the thought about an existing problem game up on out team, so I figured I'd toss up the question here to see if it's possible to find a solution to it using PRTG.

We have numerous scheduled jobs in excel on a Windows 2008R2 server, and sometimes these processes tend to lock up, so we were wondering if it's possible to set up monitoring that gives us a warning in PRTG when an excel process has been running for say 30min or more, and if possible even kill the process in such case - although just getting an alarm about it would be a big step in the right direction for the issue we're having with the jobs.

Article Comments

Dear OrderNordic

PRTG has no build-in sensor for this task. However, PRTG supports custom sensors, meaning you could write a Powershell script to read the StartTime property of a process, which can be get with the get-process command.

Please have a look at this example

$ErrorActionPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
$p="explorer"
try
{
$timespan=(New-TimeSpan -Start (get-process $p).StartTime)
write-host $timespan.totalminutes
}
catch
{
write-host "Process not running"
}

Of course such sensor script would have to be longer, since you need to insert the correct process name and format the output to conform to the Exe/Script sensor format definition.


Sep, 2015 - Permalink