Auto Restarting Windows Services

I wanted to discuss a very simple task to help with keeping services running. In most cases if you have some service running and it unexpectedly crashes, you want it to automatically come back up. This holds true whether you are an EPM pro or just starting out.

In an earlier post, I talked about a more complex event like running an external script upon failure.
http://epm-errors.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-triage-hyperion-windows-service.html
The external script solution can be good for very specific cases, but it takes a bit of work to setup. To expand upon this specific case, it is a good idea to have every Hyperion service to auto restart upon failure. This is much simpler than setting up custom scripts. It is a simple property in the Windows service settings.

The settings are located in Windows Services, under the service properties there is a Recovery tab. Here you can set the action to "Restart the Service"

An easy way to script this is to get the Service names for all Hyperion components and write up something like this:
sc \\localhost failure HyS9FRReports actions= restart/60000/restart/60000/""/60000 reset= 0

Localhost can be replaced by the server name.

Some additional tips:

• Don't infinity restart the service by setting the "subsequent failures" box. At some point you'll want to have it crash and stay down rather than flap up and down constantly.
• This restart action is not intended to solve the root cause of problems. You should be detecting when the services crash to take additional action on the root cause.
• This customization is overwritten whenever you run the Hyperion Config Tool. Config Tool resets the service properties and the custom settings would need reapplied.