This monitor tests the running state of one or more processes. It does this via SNMP by inspecting the HOST-RESOURCES-MIB hrSwRunTable. The test matches a given process as hrSwRunName against the numeric value of the hrSwRunState.

This monitor uses SNMP to accomplish its work. Therefore, systems against which you use it must have an SNMP agent supporting the HOST-RESOURCES-MIB installed and configured. Most modern SNMP agents, including most distributions of the Net-SNMP agent and the SNMP service that ship with Microsoft Windows, support this MIB. Out-of-the-box support for HOST-RESOURCES-MIB among commercial Unix operating systems may be somewhat spotty.

Monitor facts

Class Name


Configuration and use

Table 1. Monitor-specific parameters for the HostResourceSwRunMonitor
Parameter Description Default



The name of the process to be monitored. If there is a ~ at the beginning of the parameter, the rest of the string will be used as a regular expression pattern match, otherwise it will be considered an exact match.




The port of the server’s SNMP agent to test.

from snmp-config.xml


If the process name appears multiple times in the hrSwRunTable, and this parameter is set to true, then all instances of the named process must match the value specified for run-level.



The maximum allowable value of hrSWRunStatus among
runnable(2) = waiting for resource
notRunnable(3) = loaded but waiting for event
invalid(4) = not loaded



The numeric object identifier (OID) from which process names are queried. Defaults to hrSwRunName. You should never change it under normal circumstances. That said, changing it to hrSwRunParameters (. is often helpful when dealing with processes running under Java Virtual Machines which all have the same process name java.



The numeric object identifier (OID) from which run status is queried. Defaults to hrSwRunStatus and should never be changed under normal circumstances.


This monitor implements the Common Configuration Parameters.


The following example shows how to monitor the process called httpd running on a server using this monitor. Define the configuration in poller-configuration.xml as follows:

<service name="Process-httpd" interval="300000" user-defined="false" status="on">
    <parameter key="retry" value="3"/>
    <parameter key="service-name" value="~.*httpd.*"/>(1)
    <parameter key="run-level" value="3"/>(2)
    <parameter key="match-all" value="true"/>(3)

<monitor service="Process-httpd" class-name="org.opennms.netmgt.poller.monitors.HostResourceSwRunMonitor"/>
1 Name of the process on the system.
2 Test if the process is in a valid state (in other words, have a run-level no higher than notRunnable(3).
3 If the httpd process runs multiple times, the test is done for each instance of the process.