Setting System Attendant and Information Store Services to Restart if they Fail
The System Attendant service recently failed which caused our Exchange server to stop sending/receiving mail. We believe we have remedied the problem that caused it to fail. We would like to set the Recovery on this service and the Information Store service to restart if they fail. We have set up our monitoring software to keep an eye on these services but would like to reduce our time to recover in the event of a service failing. I would like to know if any one sees a problem with doing this? Also, these are the only services that I am considering setting to restart. Does anyone think I should set others to restart too?
June 9th, 2011 4:20pm

System Attendant is a main service in Exchange sevrer and consist other services too, this mean that is SA service goes down then depedent services also goes down. In this situation you can trigger event to start MS Exchange automatic service. If you use SCOM then you can do this.Anil MCC 2011,ITIL V3,MCSA 2003,MCTS 2011, My Blog : http://messagingschool.wordpress.com
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June 10th, 2011 12:52am

Hi, Do you get any errors relating to this problem in event log? If yes, please post them here for further research.Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread. Thanks Gen Lin-MSFT
June 10th, 2011 4:50am

I guess you are running Exchange 2003! When these services fails to start that means there could be issue with your AD or Network, DNS. Also, these are the only services that I am considering setting to restart. Does anyone think I should set others to restart too? What do you mean by considering it to setting to restart. There is no application or system which will force the service to restart if it fails (As far as i know) In which situation you want to restart these services, please describe.Gulab | MCITP: Exchange 2010-2007 | Skype: Gulab.Mallah | Blog: www.ExchangeRanger.blogspot.com
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June 10th, 2011 6:11am

He's likley referring to the services.msc, recover tab of the service. Sure you can set it to "restart the service" Typically I leave it as is, reason being if the service fails, majority of the times it doesn't start back up right away whether it's due to some DC timesouts or someother reason. Also with monitoring in place you can take manual action anyways. However you can set it to restart no harm it that it's just each individual preference.James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com
June 10th, 2011 9:54am

I have resolved the problem with the System Attendant crashing so that is no longer the issue. As Jamestechman eluded to, I am talking about the recovery tab in services for each of these two services. I have monitoring in place so I will be notified if these services go down but this situation made me think that setting the services to restart might buy me some time. Consider this situation: 1. The System Attendant service crashes, 2. I am notified that the service crashed but me and my coworkers are no where near a computer, 3. Since me and my coworkers are about an hour away from being able fix the problem the service automatically restarts and fixes itself. 4. I am able to look into what caused the problem while Exchange is still working saving myself some downtime. Jamestechman says he doesn't think there is any harm in setting them to restart. I'd be curious if anyone else agrees or disagrees.
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June 14th, 2011 11:36am

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