I had an oddball situation where the app pool of a given site would keep stopping. No one visits this site with a browser, it’s used just for search crawling. So when it goes down, we never know.

In theory SCOM can tell us this, but SCOM produces so much noise that it’s easy to miss things.

import-module webadministration

	function main{
	#get-command -module webadministration will show all the IIS stuff
	$appPoolName = "SharePoint - www.mysite.com443"
	
	$dt = get-date
	$ComputerName = $env:computername
	If((get-WebAppPoolState -name $appPoolName).Value -eq "Stopped")
	{
		write-host "Failure detected, attempting to start it"
		start-webAppPool -name $appPoolName
		start-sleep -s 60
		
		If((get-WebAppPoolState -name $appPoolName).Value -eq "Stopped")
		{
			write-host "Tried to restart, but it didn't work!"
			sendmail "AppPoolRestart Failed" "App Pool $appPoolName restart on $ComputerName failed - this will effect search `n $dt"
			#log to event log
		}
		else
		{
			write-host "Looks like the app pool restarted ok"
			$subjectString = "AppPool Restart was needed"
			$body = "A routine check of the App Pool $appPoolName on $ComputerName found that it was not running, it has been started. `n $dt"
			sendmail $subjectString $body
			#log to event log?
		}
	}
	else
	 {
	 write-host "app pool $appPoolName is running"
	 }
 } #end main function
 
 function sendmail($subject, $body)
 {
    
    write-host "in Sendmail with subject: $subject, and body: $body"
	
	$EmailFrom = "WEBMONITOR@mydomain.com"
	$EmailTo = "jack@mydomain.com"
	$EmailBody = $body
	$EmailSubject = $subject
	$SMTPServer = "DNS.name.of.your.internal.smtp.server.com"
 
	Send-MailMessage -From $EmailFrom -To $EmailTo -Subject $subject -body $EmailBody -SmtpServer $SMTPServer
	"Emailed $subject on $dt to $EmailTo" | out-file -filepath "CheckSearchAppPools.log" -append 
 }
 
 #call main function
 main