Hi Dave,
I can’t speak to your SNMP questions, but in regards to your Windows service questions, the rules in Checkmk should make this quite easy.
Depending on what exactly you are trying to accomplish, you should look at Service monitoring rules > Windows Services, Service discovery rules > Windows service discovery, or Enforced services > Windows Services.
Service monitoring rules allow for customizing how a given service is monitored. By default, any monitored service is only considered “OK” if it is “Running” with an “Automatic” startup type.
Service discovery rules allow for customizing which services should be considered interesting if they are present on a host being monitored. For example, we use a rule that identifies our custom-built Windows services as interesting. These services are not expected to be present on every machine, but we do want to monitor them on any host where they do exist.
Lastly, enforced services allow for specifying services that must be present. For example, we use a rule that enforces the presence of the third-party tool we use for log forwarding on Windows. If the specified service is not found on a host to which the rule applies, Checkmk treats this as an error and the Checkmk service itself goes into a Warning state.
Hope this helps,
Jason