Sage 100

We have a customer using KnowledgeSync extensively. Every once in a while, the KS service quits running or gets hung up on the server. Does anyone know of a way to get notification if a service has issues, e.g. an email stating service [whatever] is not running? Obviously, we can't use KnowledgeSync itself as the email would not get sent. In the meantime, I have added a daily email to myself stating it is working but I know there will come a day I won't notice that I didn't get it. Suggestions?

We use KSync internally and used to have lots of problems with the service stopping. We have the ""I'm Alive"" alert running every morning, but you are right, it gets missed when eventually the service fails. What I did that helped a lot is to set up a couple of scheduled tasks on the server that nightly stops the service and 5 minutes later starts the service. When we upgraded to a Windows 2008 R2 server, the old stop/restart jobs did not get migrated, but we haven't had problems like we used to. I haven't had the problem on client installations. You may want to look at upgrading your client if they are on an older version.

Thanks @ShawnSlavin . That's what I was looking for - either a task to stop/restart the service or something. I believe they are on a Windows 2008 R2 server as well. I like your ""I'm Alive"" alert better than my ""KS is working. No action required"" message...

You can also setup a monitoring ""reflector."" Have your customer's ksync send an email to your in-house ksync every 30 minutes or so. Setup an event on your in-house ksync to count those over 3-hr period, and send an alert to to you if it counts less than 6. (You'll probably look for less than 5, because email and network latencies will generate a lot of false alarms if you watch it tool tightly.) Then set up one of your customer's to count the ""beacon flashes"" coming from your ksync, and you have a complete alarm system. We've used this for years with one customer and it's worked great. BTW, that customer encountered hangs because at least one of scripts running on it to do a script-based search will eventually tangle. Nobody couldn't figure out where the conflict's cause was so we just alarmed it.

Wow, nice idea @JerryNorman - thanks!

If you are in services.msc and double click on the KSync service, there's a Recovery tab. You could set each failure to ""Restart the Service"" and if the service suddenly drops, Windows will attempt to restart it automatically. We usually set the ""Reset fail count"" to 1 day and ""Restart Service after"" to 5 minutes. Another option on the failure drop down is to Run a Program, which could be a batch file that sends you an email saying ""KnowledgeSync has fallen and it can't get up"" (or something to that effect).

FWIW, the hang I dealt with wouldn't recover with just a Service restart. It required a reboot. Now, this IS really old software. It was installed in 2002 on Windows 2000 Server, and never updated. Hopefully options work better now....

We checked the Recovery tab and the Restart option was selected @SteveIwanowski but in this case, the service said Stopping so it never actually stopped, with no Start or Stop option available. I started Task Manager and killed the KS processes and that gave me the Start option again, which I did and it then worked.