Check the status of Windows services through REST calls

We wanted to check through ELB if a windows server was still running a specific service. Now, we can just point the ELB healthcheck to a specific service, and the ELB will mark the Windows machine as unhealthy whenever the Service fails to run or has crashed.

Download a release, and install the executable as a service, eg with NSSM: nssm install ServiceRestHealthcheck C:\service-rest-healthcheck-winx86-0.0.2.exe

The healthcheck service will run on port 8484. Use these endpoints:

• /ping/: You can use this check whether the service is actually running. Will return a 200 OK with pong
• /service/[service]/status: Check for the service status. Will return a 200 OK when the service is running with the service state. A 404 when the service is not found, and a 50x when the service is not found, or if there was another reason why the service could not be checked (see the logs).

$ curl -i http://1.2.3.4:8484/service/bthserv/status/
HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2015 19:20:21 GMT
Content-Length: 22
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Service is not running

$ curl -i http://1.2.3.4:8484/service/foobar/status/
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2015 19:20:15 GMT
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

$ curl -i http://1.2.3.4:8484/service/power/status/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2015 19:19:31 GMT
Content-Length: 29
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Service is running: {4 4 0 0}

Get all the dependencies, go get -d, and run make. The build will be in the bin directory.