Monitoring windows services (and others)

Question

Hi,
I am just developing a small, modular monitoring utility, to remotly monitor specific computers on software crashes. Now I would like to code a module, that watches windows services. Are there any classes useful for this? There are a lot of programms listing service status remotely, but I found no useful documentation how they do so, and no (java) source code, that I could adept or at least unterstand. Any tips?
Thanks,
Rolf

Answer 1

I have actually done the same myself. I let a windows java-application run on a remote computer, and connected to it with Sockets. The remote application could then query the service states of the local computer.
I used PSTools http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PsTools.html (free) for this purpose. The code is ugly but worked. You need to use Runtime.exec launching psservice and then parse the output with Process.getInputStream. Since you are bound to windows-NT platform (which services are), this should not be any problem.
Example:
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\d");
Process proc = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(new String[] {
               "c:\\pstools\\psservice.exe", "query", "A service name"
         BufferedReader lReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(proc.getInputStream()));
         String lLine;
         while ((lLine = lReader.readLine()) != null) {
            if (lLine.indexOf("STATE") >= 0) {
               Matcher lM = pattern.matcher(lLine);
               if (lM.find()) {
                  if (lM.group().equals("4")) {
                     System.out.println("Service is running");
                  } else {
                     System.out.println("Some other service state");
               return;
         }