How do I monitor the spooler service to see if it has hung?, in the Printing forum on BrianMadden.com

We have an issue with the print spooler haning caused by a dodgy print driver....
Is there any way of monitoring the print spooler service to see if it has hung rather than crashed?

That is until we can hunt down this dodgy print driver?

Brian

If you have Server Monitoring software you will probably be able to add in an alert and response for services, if not IMAPing from DABCC.com is a great product.

For a rough and ready fix you can restart the spooler on a crash and maybe create a recursive batch file to keep the spooler up but, I would say for stability you sould find the source of the problem, look for NT based kernel memory drivers first and lock down the servers (via GPO)so users cannot install drivers.

Here is a nice doc from Citrix - http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX107137

Regards, Emil

Thanks for the reply Emil,

If you have Server Monitoring software you will probably be able to add in an alert and response for services

Any Server monitoring software I have seen only moitors crashes not hangs for the print spooler. What server monitoring software are you tlaking about?

I will have a look at IMAPing, Brian

Thanks for the reply Emil,

If you have Server Monitoring software you will probably be able to add in an alert and response for services

Any Server monitoring software I have seen only moitors crashes not hangs for the print spooler. What server monitoring software are you tlaking about?

I will have a look at IMAPing, Brian

I was thinking if you had something in house like OpenView you could turn it to monitor the Servers

-- Emil