title: Heartbeat activity for Windows Service
body: <p>I have many Windows Services (written in C# 4.0) that at various intervals connect to a database and do various complex tasks.  Some of these tasks only occur every X hour intervals per day.  However, the server support team would like to know if the Windows Service is actually running as there can be a big interval between tasks.  They would like essentially a heartbeat for each Windows Service.  Every 5 minutes the Windows Service would do something that could be monitored by Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM).  Any solution must being easily monitored by SCOM as the server support team rely on it.</p>
  
  <p>What is the best way to achieve this type of funcationality?  I thought of using Performance Counters and have SCOM listen for those but not sure if that is that best use of perf counters.</p>
  
  <p>UPDATE (Totally forgot to include): Currently each service writes to a database this action but SCOM is not very good at monitoring databases records and differentiating which service is doing what etc. </p>