Remote Windows Services Control

When a service on a remote machine hangs, stops, or needs its startup behaviour changed, you don't have to open a remote session or hand the job to a local admin. From an endpoint's Agent Details page, the Services section lets you list a Windows machine's services live and start, stop, restart, pause or resume any of them, change a service's startup type, and configure its recovery (failure) actions — all from the console over the agent's existing secure channel.

Opening the Services section#

From Agents, click an endpoint to open its Agent Details page, then choose Services in the left-hand section list. The section opens on a searchable table of the machine's services. A search box above the table filters by service name or display name as you type, and the list is sorted by display name by default.

Each row shows four columns:

Live mode vs. cached mode#

A badge at the top of the section tells you which data you're looking at:

When the agent is offline the section shows the banner “Agent is offline. Live service operations are not available.” The cached list still lets you see what services exist and how they were last configured, which is useful when you're planning work on a machine that isn't currently connected.

Quick actions from the list#

While an agent is Live, each row carries an Actions column with inline buttons so you can act without opening the service first:

The button for an action that doesn't apply to the current state is disabled, so you can't, for example, start a service that's already running. While an operation is in flight the affected row shows a spinner; when it completes you get a brief confirmation (Service started / stopped / restarted successfully) and the list refreshes to show the new status. If the operation fails, the reason reported by the endpoint is shown instead.

The service properties dialog#

Clicking a row — or its Properties button — opens a dialog with everything about that one service. It has a General tab and, on Windows, a Recovery tab.

General tab#

The General tab shows the service's full detail and gives you its controls in one place:

• Service name and Display name.
• Description — the service's own description text.
• Path to executable — the binary (and arguments) Windows launches.
• Startup type — a dropdown you can change to Automatic, Automatic (Delayed Start), Manual or Disabled (see Changing the startup type).
• Status — the live state, with Start, Stop and Restart buttons beneath it. Pause and Resume buttons also appear when the service supports pausing.
• Log on as — the account the service runs under — and the Process ID when the service is running.
• Dependencies — This service depends on and the list of services that depend on it, so you can see what else you might affect before you stop something.

Running an action from this dialog reloads the service's detail in place, so the Status and Process ID update to reflect the result.

Changing the startup type#

Pick a new value in the Startup type dropdown and an Apply button appears; click it to push the change to the endpoint. The four choices are:

Changing the startup type does not start or stop the service by itself — it only decides how the service behaves at the next boot (or the next start request). Use the control buttons if you also need to change the running state now.

Recovery tab — failure actions#

The Recovery tab configures what Windows should do if the service fails — the same settings you'd find on a service's Recovery properties tab locally. You can set a separate action for the first failure, the second failure, and subsequent failures. Each can be one of:

Two timing fields round out the policy:

• Reset fail count after (days) — how long the machine waits with no failures before it resets the failure counter back to the first-failure action. Set to 0 to never reset.
• Restart service after (minutes) — the delay before a Restart the Service action takes effect.

When you choose Run a Program for any of the three failures, a Run program field appears for the program or script path. When you choose Restart the Computer, a Reboot message field appears for the warning shown before the reboot. Click Apply to save; the tab confirms “Recovery options saved successfully.”

Who can use it, and when#

The Services section lives on the Agent Details page, which is available to signed-in operators and administrators. Control actions only appear while the agent is Live (online); when it's offline you get the read-only cached list described above.

Because the endpoint carries out the operation using Windows' own service control, the result — and any error — reflects exactly what Windows would report locally. If a service won't stop because another service depends on it, or a startup-type change is refused, the message you see is the one Windows returned.

Practical tips#

• Use the search box to jump straight to a service by its short name (e.g. spooler) or its display name.
• Prefer Restart over a manual Stop-then-Start when you just need to bounce a service — it's one click and waits for the stop to finish first.
• Open Agent Logs in another view before you restart a service that keeps failing, so you can watch what the machine reports as it comes back up.
• If a service keeps dying, set a Recovery action of Restart the Service with a sensible delay rather than babysitting it from the console.
• For a machine that's currently offline, the Cached list still shows what services exist and how they were last configured — handy for planning.