Posted onSeptember 20, 2015 (Revised July 6, 2024)
Wellsoft Corporation, developer and provider of the industry-leading Emergency Department Information System (EDIS) since 1990, is consistently ranked #1 in KLAS user surveys of EDIS time and again. Recognized for providing the most complete functionality and most configurable product on the market, Wellsoft is the specialist in Emergency Department Information Systems.
Wellsoft has been including AlwaysUp for its clients since 2007.
Why does Wellsoft use AlwaysUp for all implementations?
Wellsoft’s Emergency Department Information System (EDIS) is a mission critical application for hospital emergency departments. The software must operate 24 hours a day, with unparalleled availability and reliability. AlwaysUp helps us maintain superior uptimes for clients by:
Automatically starting the Wellsoft application if the server is rebooted
Automatically restarting the application if the server hangs or uses too much memory
Restarting instances of Wellsoft during routine Microsoft memory or CPU spikes that close a running copy
Sending email alerts to report potential problems and support our IT staff
We selected AlwaysUp based on its feature set, simplicity and cost — it was the best solution for our clients.
How are you using AlwaysUp today?
AlwaysUp is a required part of every implementation of Wellsoft EDIS. To date, we manage over 70 licenses of AlwaysUp in various versions.
What are your favorite features of AlwaysUp?
For Wellsoft: The ease of use, immediate notifications and customer service are right at the top of the list. When we do require assistance, the level of support from Core Technologies is unrivaled.
For our clients: Ease of use; we have found that even our least “techy” clients can use the information provided by AlwaysUp to determine what they can handle and when they need to involve Wellsoft.
Any other comments on working with our company, support, etc?
Yes! We recently used the Activity Report feature to help us locate a memory issue that was causing several of our clients to experience program disruptions. We were able to narrow our focus thanks to AlwaysUp’s weekly statistics, saving us incalculable time.
Posted onSeptember 7, 2015 (Revised February 1, 2024)
Our month-long evaluation of AlwaysUp 9.1 running windows services on Windows 10 started soon after the new operating system was released on July 29th. Testing was comprehensive, targeting all major features including:
Installation & setup
Sending emails in response to key events
Running programs in the background in Session 0
Starting applications interactively in the current session
Restarting an application if it uses too much memory
Detecting CPU spikes
Responding to customized failure detection scripts (“sanity checks”)
The end result is that AlwaysUp 9.1 is fully compatible with Windows 10!
The only trouble we noticed was when interacting with applications running in Session 0…
The Keyboard and Mouse didn’t work in Session 0
We were able to switch to the isolated Session 0 but couldn’t interact with the application running there. The mouse cursor vanished and the keyboard was unresponsive. We couldn’t even click the “Return now” button to go back to the normal desktop!
Fortunately this bug has already been reported to Microsoft and a resolution may be on the way.
We were unable to see Session 0 when logged in through RDP
The second oddity we encountered was when logged in to our server via RDP. Switching to Session 0, either from the Interactive Services Detection Dialog or from AlwaysUp, resulted in an unhelpful “black screen”. The black screen remained for one minute, until the Session 0 timeout elapsed and we were unceremoniously disconnected from the server. We experienced this with RDP versions 6.2.9200 and 6.3.9600 and our recommended driver updates didn’t resolve the problem. Hopefully Microsoft will fix this one quickly too.
Trinium Technologies provides business software for two primary verticals: intermodal trucking companies and fuel marketers. Its applications enable companies to reduce cost, grow revenue, and improve customer service. Customers range in size from small businesses to large enterprises with both cloud services and on-premises deployment options available.
Barry Assadi, the Chief Technical Officer at Trinium, has been using AlwaysUp since 2006. He knows AlwaysUp very well and was interviewed for this article.
Why does Trinium use AlwaysUp?
Trinium uses AlwaysUp to handle processes for file transfer (FTP), file import & export interfaces, and report generation. We used to deploy automated background processes with Windows Task Scheduler, but there were constant stability issues along with a lack of visibility of the status of these processes. AlwaysUp runs our executables without fail, and its detailed reporting tell us how our applications are doing.
Customer service is very important to us, so we have a dedicated AlwaysUp process per customer that is used to keep a heartbeat on all of the services we’ve created. This way we can see if any processes are hung or stopped to avoid any downtime for our customers.
How is AlwaysUp deployed in your business?
Each non-hosted customer will get an installation of AlwaysUp to run our software as a service in their environment. We also run AlwaysUp in Trinium’s hosted private cloud, which has a few dedicated servers reserved for processing using AlwaysUp.
What are your favorite features of AlwaysUp?
Over the years, we’ve come to appreciate the depth of settings to manage the processes we model as a service. There seems to be a solution for everything we’ve thrown at AlwaysUp!
Our more technical customers are happy that they can now stop and restart our applications from their batch files (using the NET command).
And we especially like the ability to multi-select to start/stop/restart processes. It is very convenient as our techs install and work with multiple services per server.
Incorporated in 2007 and driven by new opportunities in the “Internet-of-Things” (IoT) market, CartaSense offers end-to-end monitoring and alerting capabilities for cold-chain, agricultural and asset security applications. CartaSense provides complete field proven systems using wireless sensors, gateways and cloud based computing that deliver real-time information to support real-time decision making for increased efficiency and profits.
Chaim Belfer, the Vice President of R&D at CartaSense, has been using AlwaysUp with his Java programs since 2010. He currently manages more than 20 installations and was interviewed for this article.
How does CartaSense use AlwaysUp?
CartaSense deploys several Java applications that manage a world wide network of sensors. For security and management purposes, we need to run our windows installations as windows services. Looking for a solution we found AlwaysUp which solves the problem — plus helps with recovery and logging.
For the past few years, AlwaysUp has been included whenever we install our software on a Windows Server (2008 or 2012). We also recommend AlwaysUp to our own customers.
Why did you choose AlwaysUp for your Java applications?
We found your company through a Google search a few years ago. I tested several open source solutions but none of them really did the job, or at least needed a lot of development to make it work reliably. AlwaysUp worked well from the beginning (the 30-day trial) so we started out with a single license and bought more over time, as needed.
What are your favorite features of AlwaysUp?
Beyond solving the big problem of running our Java applications as windows services, AlwaysUp’s GUI is very nice and self explanatory. The documentation is also good, and the software is easy to use. Prompt service and quick response to our support emails is a big plus too!
A regular application is one that you start and run on your Windows desktop. You launch it from a desktop icon, by double-clicking an associated document, or by typing its name at a command prompt. Examples include Microsoft Excel, Adobe Reader, Google Chrome and virtually any other program you consciously interact with on your PC. These are the programs that you know, love and use every day — the ones that make your computer a remarkably powerful tool.
What is a windows service?
A Windows Service is a special program designed to “plug into” Windows. It typically chugs along doing its work in the background, never revealing itself, with little or no attention from anyone using the PC. It turns out that a whole host of these invisible workers are necessary to make your PC work smoothly! For example, the Print Spooler windows service ensures that your documents arrive at the printer, while the Workstation service makes the Internet available for all applications. Important tasks indeed!
What’s the difference?
So with those basics in place, here are the 10 most important ways that a windows service differs from a regular application:
A windows service can start automatically at boot, without anyone having to log on. A regular application only runs when a user is logged in. This key distinction makes the windows service framework the better choice for software that must run 24×7, surviving the inevitable reboot along the way.
A windows service won’t exit when you or anyone else logs off the PC. A regular application will stop when you log out.
Windows services don’t run visibly on your desktop (not since Vista). They are confined to the isolated Session 0 and can not (usually) show their windows or tray icons to anyone logging into the PC. This restriction makes it very difficult for a windows service to interact with someone using the computer and consequently Microsoft strongly discourages implementing GUI services.
A windows service can be easily started or stopped from the command line using the NET or SC commands. This capability is a boon to sysadmins and technical folks, who can conveniently manage a service’s lifetime through unattended, administrative scripts.
Only a single instance of a windows service can be started at any time. That single copy must serve all users on the PC. This is very different than a regular application, which typically permits multiple copies, especially when several people are logged in.
Services typically run in the Local System account, which has administrative powers over many aspects of the PC. Thus your average service will have more rights and control over your computer than your typical application running in the context of a regular user’s account.
When run as LocalSystem, a service has access to UNC paths (for example, “\\server\data”) but cannot access mapped drive letters. You should run the service in a regular user account to access network drives, and even then the service may have to map drives explicitly (for example, with the NET USE command) to gain access.
All windows services support sophisticated recovery options for when they stop unexpectedly. You can restart the service, run a command line or even reboot the computer.
While each regular application is backed by a single, unique process, it is possible for many services to share a single running process. This situation makes it possible for some services to start rapidly and make efficient use of resources — important characteristics for critical components that must always be available.
A windows service must contain special code to respond to instructions from the Windows Service Control Manager (SCM). For the technical folks, this means implementing the ServiceMain (or equivalent) entry point in your application.
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