Monday 1 February 2016

Restarting a service with PowerShell

We use Redgate's SQL Monitor to keep an eye on our mission critical servers. I like the product. It is reasonably user-friendly, reliable and it helps my team monitor our servers efficiently. I've used other products before and I think SQL Monitor compares favourably. No, I'm not paid by RedGate!!!

With that in mind, my team has been struggling a bit with an ongoing issue: every Monday morning one of the SQL Monitor processes was running amok and maxing out CPU! This was strange, as the product is generally pretty stable. After some investigation, we realised that the security team had started performing regular vulnerability scans over the weekends. Part of this test involved intentional failed login attempts. SQL Monitor can't seem to handle this, and the web server, specifically the "xsp4" process goes haywire and trashes the CPU.