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I regularly have the problem that after windows server updates the application server is automatically restarted and the ArcGIS Server 10.0 services are not restarted. I am not aware of this until my colleagues call to ask why the system isn´t showing Geodata. This then takes 30 minutes to stop the tomcat server, flush logs, restart AGS services and test that everything is running.

Is there a monitoring tool which would indicate or even send emails when the status of running services change?

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    Thats a tough one...after 5 years we haven't yet finished it to implement enough heartbeat tests to check if an arcgis server instance is working as expected or not. There are commercial tools for it (like geocortex.com/arcgis-server-software/geocortex-optimizer ) but even with that it is tricky. Please add some information about which ArcGIS server services and protocols you use actually and if its only one map service or a couple of map services as this brings more complexity into your checks. – Jürgen Zornig Oct 17 '14 at 11:37
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In theory this is a "solved" problem from a SysAdmin perspective. Any good monitoring package can monitor things, it just depends on identifying things to monitor (for which it helps having well documented protocols; ArcGIS's proprietary services make things somewhat tricker).

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/09/top-5-best-network-monitoring-tools/ - contains one list. Nagios is one I have experience with an works fine; bonus in that it's open-source. I used it successfully to monitor a GeoServer install at a lot of different levels:

  • WMS/WFS requests succeeding (parsing XML responses).
  • TomCat service still running (Windows service checker)
  • GeoWebCache not being over-whelmed (Parsing of a HTML page)
  • Load balancer working fine (Parsing of a .properties file).

You may also be interested in the sister https://serverfault.com/ community.

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  • Nagios is a great system. Our sysadmin at a previous job used it for all the servers in the building. You can get very refined in the types of things that you monitor and set up e-mail alerts for etc. – jbchurchill Oct 17 '14 at 13:26
  • We had the problem that ArcGIS WMS protocol still was delivering a HTTP 200 ok with image content on a WMS GetMap request where the image was empty because ArcGIS server lost database connection and therefore didn't render images anymore...also the REST Service wasn't responding, but the WMS service just ignored that ArcGIS Server wasn't fully operable anymore. It also happens that certain services are down while the rest of the server answers on the checks you defined in NAGIOS ... thats whats tricky about it – Jürgen Zornig Oct 19 '14 at 9:31
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I'm not aware of any existing tools, but you can find information in the server logs if a context has failed to start or failed to connect to datasource (depending on logging level). They are available in C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcGIS\Server10.0\server\user\log (or where your install dir is). You could either just scan through the textfiles or use Arcobjects IServerLog interface.

Information about the logfiles is here: http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisserver/10.0/help/arcgis_server_dotnet_help/index.html#/How_log_files_work/0093000000mv000000/

Another approach would be writing a ServerObjectExtension that on certain events or periodically logs something to a watchdog process.

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You could try ArcGIS System monitor

http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=848f48b0f88e4de7a036377197453efe

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Monitoring tools such Nagios are good for general monitoring, but to be able to restart an ArcGIS Server service in the event of a service shutdown, you need a tool that is integrated and runs on ArcGIS Rest admin api. As far as I know there is only one tool that currently does it - iGeoAsset. Seems like it not only sends instant notification via email/text in the event of a ArcGIS server service or geodatabase shutdown but also has the capability to auto-authenticate and restart an ArcGIS service.

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Geocortex Analytics is the successor to Geocortex Optimizer, very easy to use and can monitor many aspects of your ArcGIS Server. Geocortex Analytics

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