Here's a weird one for you regarding monitoring services

Wouldn't every instance need a seperate configuration file? You could simply count the amount of configs per server and work with limits, if I got this right :)

Thanks for the reply. The problem is that sometimes, the configurations files (as well as other files) stay on the server after removing an instance, so this would lead to a miscalculation as opposed to counting the active services.

Ah, conditional as well! ;) A ssh script sensor might work as well:

#!/bin/bash
##############
# uncomment the command available on the system
##############
#count=$(pgrep -c mysqld)
#count=$(ps -C mysqld --no-headers | wc -l)

echo "0:$count:Active SQL daemons: $count"

That should actually do the trick :)

My apologies, I did not specify the version of SQL we are using. It's SQL Express 2008 R2, not MySQL. How would you go about and modify this command? Also, I did not know I could add these sort of commands in PRTG.

Oh okay. What would be the following PowerShell script:

param($computer)
$Count = (Get-Service -Name "MSSQL*" -ComputerName $computer).Count
Write-Host "$($Count):Active SQL services: $($Count)"; 

Save it to
C:\Program Files (x86)\PRTG Network Monitor\Custom Sensors\EXE\Count-MSSQL-Instances.ps1 ... and create a new EXE/Script sensor on the SQL host. Use %host as the only parameter.

Notes

• Execute Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned in a elevated 32bit PowerShell if you don't have any custom script sensors yet.
• Make sure the device has administrative Windows credentials configured

Thank you. We'll give this a try today or next week and let you know the results.

Update: Ya, powershell was too much of a pain to configure with security and everything. My college found a workaround by running this script with a simple WMI custom script: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Win32_Process WHERE Name='sqlservr.exe'

Thanks anyway :)

Alright then :) Couldn't figure out how to do the COUNT(*) statement in WQL, it always error'd on me :D