NT Services
  • 30 Oct 2023
  • 3 Minutes to read
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NT Services

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Article Summary

In this section, we will see how to set up monitoring of NT Services in SQL Server using BizTalk360.

Monitoring the NT Services in SQL Server

Windows NT services can automatically get started when the system boots up, while a few of them require manual intervention to get them started. As important as the services are to allow the system to perform its regular actions, it is important to monitor their status on a periodic basis. For instance, let us consider the IIS Admin Service. The IIS Admin service hosts the IIS configuration and it is responsible to monitor the SMTP and FTP connections to your server. This NT service needs to be started when the server boots up. Accidentally, if this service does not start, you will be unable to configure SMTP or FTP and, in turn, any other NT services that depend on it will fail to start. Therefore, you need to set up monitoring for this NT Service, to send you an alert when the status is "Stopped". It is a general best practice to monitor NT Services that are important for BizTalk like the Enterprise Single Sign-On, BAM Alerts or the World Wide Web Publishing Service to be running and monitor some other services to be stopped so that resources on the Servers are not being overutilized.

You can monitor the NT services for two different states - Running and Stopped. A Running state indicates that the NT service has been started and is currently performing the respective operations. A Stopped state means that the NT service is not running and needs manual intervention to be started. You can set up the alerts for the different states to be alerted when there is a violation in these states. 


Setting up monitoring for NT Services

  • Log in to the BizTalk360 application
  • Click 'Monitoring' in the navigation panel 
  • Click the expand button against 'Manage Mapping' tab and depending on your requirement, select the 'SQL Servers' link 
  • Select the SQL server from the drop-down for which you want to set up the monitoring on NT services
  • Select the Alarm name (See Manage Alarms) from the drop-down for which you would like to associate the alerts
  • At the tab pages at the top, select 'NT Services'
  • Choose the NT Services that you wish to monitor and receive the alerts
  • Select the check box against the NT Services to activate the alerts
  • Set the value of 'Expected State' by selecting the value from the drop-down. For instance, if the current state of the NT Service is Running and you want to be alerted when it is stopped, you need to set the value in the drop-down to Running 
  • You can also monitor the startup type and log on as an account for the above monitoring NT Services by simply clicking on the respective NT Service which opens the monitoring configuration blade.
    • Set the expected state for Startup type as Auto / Manual, Disabled  Do Not Monitor, Automatic (Delayed/Triggered start )
    • Set the expected logon as Local user, Domain user, Local Service, NT Service account,etc 
  • View the detailed monitoring result of the above-mapped state alert, logon alert Start up type alert by clicking on the eye icon in the respective NT Services 


Monitoring Clustered NT Services

Important Note

  • The clustered node determination has been changed in v10.8. For seamless cluster instance monitoring, the recommended approach is to remove the SQL server from environment settings and then re-add it.
  • The "At Least One Active" state is no longer supported. If you previously used this state, it will be moved to the "Orphaned" state after the update. To achieve similar monitoring, set the expected state as "Running." In this configuration, the system will automatically validate the active node service to be running.

To monitor a clustered NT service, you must begin by adding the relevant server for monitoring. Refer to this article to add a cluster server  https://docs.biztalk360.com/v10-0/docs/manage-iis-server.

Once the server has been successfully added, the system identifies the active node within the cluster. The monitoring activities happen only based on the active node. For instance, when you set the expected state of "Service 1" to "Running," the system promptly checks whether "Service 1" is currently operational on the active node. If it is running, the monitoring status is marked as "Healthy." However, if "Service 1" is found to be stopped on the active node, the status is immediately changed to "Critical." Furthermore, if "Service 1" is not available on the active node, the monitoring status is set to "Orphaned."

You can also set up AutoCorrect for this. In this case, when the "SSO service" goes down in active nodes, then the BizTalk360 monitoring service will automatically try to start the service in the current active nodes. With this, you can ensure that there is no downtime of the service.






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