Throughout our experience, we’ve frequently encountered a persistent issue where key services, such as Exchange and SQL Server, among others, unexpectedly stopped and needed to be manually restarted. It was a task that demanded an engineer’s attention to remotely access the server, identify the service that was down, and attempt to revive it.

Complications arose especially during the late hours when monitoring the status of these services became challenging. During these off-peak hours, identifying and resolving service disruptions were often delayed, causing potential downtime and disruption to business processes.

In order to mitigate these challenges and streamline the process, we embarked on a journey to design a tool tailored to our specific requirements. Our goal was to develop a solution that would not only aid our team but also prove beneficial to our fellow engineers grappling with similar challenges.

We are delighted to introduce our new, free application: Synergy Services Watcher. This tool is designed to automatically restart any service that has unexpectedly stopped but is marked as automatic, thereby reducing manual intervention and enhancing service uptime. It also features the ability to exclude certain services, which despite being marked as automatic, are designed to run only once and do not need to be constantly active.

Additionally, our tool provides an extra layer of visibility and control by generating daily logs. These logs record instances of automatic service restarts, enabling engineers to track patterns, detect recurring issues, and conduct in-depth investigations as required.

With this tool, we hope to aid in the prompt resolution of service issues, ensuring that crucial services remain operational with minimal disruption. We believe that this will prove to be an invaluable addition to the toolbox of system administrators and IT engineers alike.