The status of Windows Services are very important to keep the computer running in stable condition. Any important services that are disabled or even deleted can cause a lot of problems such as broken Windows Update, Firewall, Windows Defender, unable to Print and many more. For experienced Windows users, they may instantly suspect that the problem is caused by a service being stopped and they can either manually restart that particular service or use a third party tool such as Windows Repair to restore all services status back to default. A better way is to monitor the Windows services so you will immediately know if a service that is supposed to be started, suddenly stopped running. There are a few third party tool that can monitor Windows services but we will be taking a look at Windows Service Monitor today.
Windows Service Monitor is a free tool that is used to monitor the status of services that the user select in Windows and alerts you via icon color changes at notification area. Unfortunately the icon color changes is the only notification option in Windows Service Monitor software and there is no email, popup, sound alert or auto restarting of the service or computer when the service fails. Running Windows Service Monitor will allow you to select the services that you would like to monitor. Simply select the service from the list and click the arrow pointing to the right to monitor.
When all monitored services are started, it will show the green icon. Yellow icon means some monitored services are stopped while a gray icon means that ALL monitored services are stopped. So if you see a yellow or gray icon, you should right click on the Windows Service Monitor icon at the notification area to check which service is not running and clicking on the service from the context menu will attempt to restart the service.
There is a bug in Windows Service Monitor whereby when a monitored service is deleted, the program will crash. The only way to get Windows Service Monitor working again is to manually edit the user.config file from C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Viktar_Karpach\ and delete the invalid String. Until Viktar Karpach decides to update the program to support detection of deleted services, we will just have to keep in mind that one of the reason for Windows Service Monitor program crashing is a services being removed.