Guradian Angel is an executable that runs silently in a real time (highest) priority process and monitors the behavior of other processes or the computer overall. The measurement currently observered is the CPU utilization over a period of time for a particular process or for the computer overall, or for the absence of a process that is intended to be running. When the threshold is reached, or process disappears, then specified recovery actions are performed. The recovery actions are typically to terminate the offending process and restart it or to restart the computer.
Guardian Angel is a watchdog that will monitor a process without any interaction needed with the process and without any external hardware additions. It will successfully detect a process that utilizes an excessive amount of CPU time and allow recovery from this situation. It will do the recovery in a graceful manner by first asking the offending process to close itself down. If not successful then it will terminate the process in which the application is running. If that is not successful it will then ask all applications to shut themselves down, followed by termination of each if needed and this followed by restart of Windows.
Guardian Angel will not be successful at detecting a lockup condition in which CPU utilization is not an attribute of the lockup. Guardian Angel has the advantage over a hardware watchdog circuit in that is will not abruptly stop a process without warning as is the case with external watchdogs. It also has the advantage in that is can selectively terminate a single offending process without restarting windows and/or the computer. It downside is that depending upon the integrity of the Windows OS and it is limited in the nature of failures that it will detect.
PR 1 1.2 Added Monitoring for a process that stopped executing
PR 2 1.2 Corrected Computer Lockup on selective process restart
PR 3 1.3 Added Pulse handshake monitoring
PR 4 1.3.1 Close first process when no primary action indicated
PR 5 1.3.1 Durations of more than 1200 seconds generate timer errors
PR 6 1.3.2 Do pulse monitoring only if a pulse file is present
PR 7 1.3.2 Document updates based upon feedback
PR 8 1.3.8 Command line parameter requires quotes
PR 9 1.3.8 Remove popup except when restart is pending
PR 10 1.3.12 Increase wait allowed for process to shutdown
Download available at http://mcssprinklers.com/GuardianAngel.zip
Guardian Angel is a watchdog that will monitor a process without any interaction needed with the process and without any external hardware additions. It will successfully detect a process that utilizes an excessive amount of CPU time and allow recovery from this situation. It will do the recovery in a graceful manner by first asking the offending process to close itself down. If not successful then it will terminate the process in which the application is running. If that is not successful it will then ask all applications to shut themselves down, followed by termination of each if needed and this followed by restart of Windows.
Guardian Angel will not be successful at detecting a lockup condition in which CPU utilization is not an attribute of the lockup. Guardian Angel has the advantage over a hardware watchdog circuit in that is will not abruptly stop a process without warning as is the case with external watchdogs. It also has the advantage in that is can selectively terminate a single offending process without restarting windows and/or the computer. It downside is that depending upon the integrity of the Windows OS and it is limited in the nature of failures that it will detect.
PR 1 1.2 Added Monitoring for a process that stopped executing
PR 2 1.2 Corrected Computer Lockup on selective process restart
PR 3 1.3 Added Pulse handshake monitoring
PR 4 1.3.1 Close first process when no primary action indicated
PR 5 1.3.1 Durations of more than 1200 seconds generate timer errors
PR 6 1.3.2 Do pulse monitoring only if a pulse file is present
PR 7 1.3.2 Document updates based upon feedback
PR 8 1.3.8 Command line parameter requires quotes
PR 9 1.3.8 Remove popup except when restart is pending
PR 10 1.3.12 Increase wait allowed for process to shutdown
Download available at http://mcssprinklers.com/GuardianAngel.zip
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