One of our servers at work fell victim to several run-away processes, that’s putting it lightly, and we found that we had to monitor it constantly to see when another rogue process would bog it down.
In order to do this we logged in remotely using Remote Desktop in Windows XP. The trouble with this is that we only needed to see the CPU usage, not the whole desktop deal. So Kevin Sacry and I came up with a C# program that uses WMI to fetch server loads and report them back via a text box and a progress bar. Thus was born, Sentinel. Screenshot
I used a MDI shell and spawned server instances in separate windows. It’s little more than a hack, but it does the trick. We intend to make it a regular application and make the separate windows actual User Controls. But that’s all in good time. I think we proved you could make a quick tool using Visual Studio and C# in little more than a day.
Features we will add sooner than later include email alerts and some kind of usage history, probably from a data base. Lots of possibilities exist.