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Suggest how to track duration of process?

We have processes that run on a schedule but don't track much about them. In Orion I can monitor whether the process is running or not based on it's name (myprocess.exe).

Does anyone have a good way to build a report based on when that process ran (start&end) and how long it ran for? We have 20 servers like this and would like to see how long this process is running in the background on a daily basis across every server it runs on.

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aLTeReGo

Can you provide others in the community with more details that may be helpful, such as the operating system these processes are running under? Also, how long do these processes typically run for? If these processes run for seconds or only a minute or two, a typical polling interval may not be sufficient for catching the process in a running state. It would likely be easier to have the process itself executed through a batch file, vbscript, shell script, or through perl so you could log the timing of the process to a text file or database. By wrapping the process in the script you could have both a pre and post execution script with precise timing information.

I'll let the rest of the community chime in with their recommendations.

MrSampsonite

Thanks. Sorry about that. These are Windows Server 2008 R2 machines. They may run for minutes or hours. The ones that run for days, we'd probably track when they are NOT running instead so we can track "downtime" for the process. They definitely run for at least 5 minutes. I can be off by plus or minus 5 minutes.

I'd prefer not to use scripts because these processes are kicked off by Windows services sometimes, other applications, or other methods that I don't have the ability to control. I monitor everything, but I don't control how they get started.

morgolis

As scripting is out of the question I can think of one possibility; write an alert for when APM see's the process start running but only have it update the NPM event log and reset when the process goes away. Then you can write a custom SQL report based on the NPM event log time stamp delta's.

MrSampsonite

Thanks. This is along the lines of what I was thinking of doing, but I don't know how to build such a report. I do have the component set to "down" when the process is running, mostly so we'll know visually (it turns the Application Red in ORION). So if the report could be based on that "up/down" status that might work. Just don't know how to determine that duration in Orion.