Check if a program has thrown an exception

Question

I'm working on a status monitoring program for my company and we need to be able to know if a process on a remote machine is hanging due to not responding (that I can do) or if it's thrown an unhandled exception. I've tried a number of things from checking the CPU usage of the process to checking if the process has gone idle. Nothing has really been reliable. Is there anyway to do this? All the programs we'll be monitoring are running on either .NET 3.5 or 4.0.

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 22 '12 at 17:41

The answer will be much easier if you have control over the source of those applications.

The way that we handle this scenario is that the applications to be monitored periodically write their status to a central database. The monitoring application then checks the status in these tables on a regular basis and, if the status isn't updated for a specific period of time (i.e. 2 minutes), alerts are generated.

This helps us identify not only application problems, but also connectivity problems and unexpected machine reboots.

This might be the simplest way to do it...I'll have to ask my boss about implementing this. — MGZero, Mar 22 '12 at 18:35

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 22 '12 at 17:49

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Would checking the Event Log (System/Security) help you with the Source of the event as the process you are monitoring?

answered Mar 22 '12 at 17:49

Shrieks

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score 1 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:11

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You might try monitoring the event log on the system that the process is running on. When a process throws and exception that is unhanded an entry is made here with the process and some details on the error.

There are a few other questions here on the stack that deal with this same question.

catch another process unhandled exception
How to catch exceptions from processes in C#

edited May 23 '17 at 12:11

Community

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answered Mar 22 '12 at 17:49

iamkrillin

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What happens if no one is there to hit quit on the unhandled exception message? Does it still get logged? The idea of this monitor is to know when certain processing programs have crapped out on us while no one is there to watch them. – MGZero Mar 22 '12 at 18:38
AH, so your talking about applications that are running from an interactive session. I'm not sure if the event log entry is done after that or before (I suspect after). I dont know that there is anything else you could do (outside of modifying the code for the other applications) – iamkrillin Mar 22 '12 at 20:12
I've figured something out, I'll post it in an answer. – MGZero Mar 22 '12 at 20:38

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 22 '12 at 20:42

Thanks for the answers guys, I've got a decent work around for what I need:

After researching a bit, I found out that a .NET program runs 4 threads on startup. None of the programs that I'm monitoring here open any new threads. I also found out after some testing that the exception message is opened on a new thread and causes the CPU usage for the program to drop to 0. So, I'm checking for both of these conditions:

if CPU = 0 and threadCount > 4

Chances are, an exception was thrown. Because why else would the program be sitting there with 0 CPU and more than 4 threads? As far as I see right now, there isn't any other reason.

Check if a program has thrown an exception

4 Answers4