Microsoft Monitoring Agent service freezes during the startup process

This article provides the steps to solve the issue that the Microsoft Monitoring Agent service gets stuck in the Starting state in Service Control Manager.

Original product version:   System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager, Microsoft System Center 2012 Operations Manager
Original KB number:   3058405

Symptoms

In System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager (OpsMgr 2012 R2), the Microsoft Monitoring Agent service, also known as the health service, gets stuck in the Starting state in Service Control Manager. In this situation, you can't stop the service through Service Control Manager or by using a command prompt. If you manually end the Healthservice.exe process in Task Manager and then try to restart the service, the problem recurs.

Note

The Microsoft Monitoring Agent service was known as System Center Management in versions before Operations Manager 2012 R2.

Cause

During startup, the Microsoft Monitoring Agent service tries to write to the Operations Manager log. If the Windows Event Viewer Log service is not running or cannot start because of event log corruption, the Microsoft Monitoring Agent service gets stuck in the Starting state.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, follow these steps:

  1. Make sure that the Operations Manager services accounts have the appropriate permissions on the server. For more information about this, see System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1 security accounts matrix.

  2. Locate the Windows event log folder on your Windows server (for example, %SystemRoot%\System32\winevt\Logs), and then back up the existing event logs in another location.

  3. Delete the existing event log files, then restart the Windows Event Viewer Log service and the Microsoft Monitoring Agent service, in that order.