Monitoring services that are not set to Automatic start

The default service monitor employed in SCOM intelligently identifies if the service is set to Automatic startup and only monitors the service if it is. This is a helpful default so that if you set the service to Manual startup or Disabled for some administrative reason, then you don’t get alerted on the service stopping. But what if there are services that you want to ensure are running regardless of the startup type? Maybe you want to ensure the AntiVirus is running everywhere and you want to be alerted if someone tries to disable it. Maybe you have a key service like SQL or Exchange that you manually start after any reboots and you need still need to know when it goes down or fails to be started. This will describe how to monitor a service state regardless of the startup state.

Step 1: Create the service monitor

In the SCOM Authoring Console, select the Health Model tab and the Monitors node

Select New | Windows Services | Basic Service Monitor

Enter in the applicable information in the General and Service Name tabs and click finish

Step 2: Edit the monitor to ignore startup type

Locate the monitor just created and open its properties

On the Configuration tab you will see 3 attributes

• ComputerName
• ServiceName
• CheckStartupType

The last attribute is the important one and we need to set it to false, however simply typing false and clicking OK will not work for us.

On the Configuration tab click the Edit… button at the bottom of the window. There you will see something similar to this:

The line “<CheckStartupType />” needs to be changed to “<CheckStartupType>false</CheckStartupType>” for the value to take effect.

Save the XML file, save the Monitor properties, and save the MP. The service monitor should now ignore the startup type of the service you specified to monitor