c# - Detecting if SQL server is running

Question

I'm looking for a way to poll different servers and check that SQL server is up and running. I'm writing my code in C#. I don't particularly care about individual databases, just that SQL server is running and responsive.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Well, the brute force solution is to attempt to initiate a connection with the database on each server. That will tell you whether it's running, though you could have timeout issues.

The more elegant (but more difficult... isn't that always the way?) solution would be to use WMI to connect to the remote machine and find out if the SQL server process is running.