I need to be notified via email when a specific Windows 7 service stops running. What's the best solution?

I believe the only option you have is to make sure that you set the "First failure" action to run a program and let this program send you an e-mail.

The problem is that the information you provided might be a bit more complete.
Do you happen to have an Exchange server (or any other SMTP server for that matter) at your disposal. Is this  machine member of a domain?? Could you use Event forwarding?? DO you have other applications for monitoring??

I would also suggest not to start a program at first failure, first let the service try and "safe" itself by restarting. Just run the program on second failure.

There are 3rd party monitoring tools that can be configured to alert you, or to actually try and restart the service (assuming you want that done) if that is of any interest to you?

Alan

Thanks Alan, yeah any leads would be helpful.

Rhandels, yes it's a domain workstation with access to an SMTP server.

If you are actually willing to pay for a solution i would indeed go for that route. If you want to have a free solution it would be possible to run an application that sends an e-mail for you while using a VBscript. I'm not the best programmer in the block but i guess a look at google would possibly give you a good idea on how to do this.

I also believe you could go for a tool like Nagios but i thought it was quite cumbersome to setup. It is free however.

You could also try and setup Event viewer forwarding (see link below) and let all messages regarding stopped services to be forwarded to 1 central server. This would be way easier to manage.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748890.aspx

We use GFI Max remote monitoring - which as a support company works out good for us price-wise (as we monitor some 800+ machines), but for a one-off machine, may be expensive for you, but you can always find a partner to work with that uses it and then you are looking at a low monthly cost to monitor :)

Alan

Rhandel, I don't mind paying, so long as it's not some hugely scaled up, enterprise-wide level solution like Solar Winds or something.  I just need this for one service on one workstation.

Do you want to be alerted by email / txt when a service stops so you can restart it manually or have it auto-restarted?

Alan

Alan, Alert by text or email.

Would you want the service automatically restarted and notify you if it can't start?

I can't try to sell to you via EE - but we could help you, or if you could find a local IT company using something like GFI Max, then they could help you too.

Monitoring a single service has a very low cost (to us) and email alerts are free, but texts would cost on a per text basis.

Alan

Nice one!  Free is good ;)

Mine was the best solution to my issue.