Is there are tool for Windows that notifies about and can kill long-running processes?

Question

Sometimes different scheduled tasks on different servers just stop working for no apparent reason (at least none I could clearly identify) and I would like to get notified about it via email and/or want the process get automatically killed.
The tool I'm searching for should run as a Windows service and I would like to specify the processes to look for via regular expressions which should be applied to the command lines of all running processes.

Answer 1

I've not heard of a program to do that, but when setting up a scheduled task you can go into the Settings tab, and set it to kill the task if it runs for more than X hours/days.

Answer 2

The SysinternalsSuite has a tool called pslist.exe.

PsList uses the Windows NT/2K performance counters to obtain the information it displays. You can find documentation for Windows NT/2K performance counters, including the source code to Windows NT's built-in performance monitor, PerfMon, in MSDN

It can take a "\\computer" argument to fetch
process information from another machine on the network.

Once you decide you want to kill a process, there is a similar tool, pskill.exe.
This works on remote machines similarly.

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A long-running task is not necessarily stalled.
You should analyze your tasks with the pslist command to identify stalled state.
These tools can then be used to kill such errant tasks remotely (from a single 'control' machine).

Both these tools are command line, allowing you to script from the control machine
(you just need remote access on the target machines).

Answer 3

Set up a scheduled task with taskkill

taskkill.exe /f /fi “status eq not responding”

But than off course you don't get any feedback on what it killed

Perhaps you can let a command echo you what programs are non-responding and email the echo to you.

Or check if VisualCron can help do the job for you, it let's you set up scheduled tasks, also for killing tasks and notifies you in whichever way you want. With a simple GUI to setup the scheduled task. However I couldn't find if it also checks for tasks that are non-responding...

Though I suspect you're asking for a solution that will either require some coding from your side or simply doesn't exist...