Starting and stopping the watcher service manually

The watcher service is the communication gateway between the Management Station and managed hosts and is automatically installed with Nuance speech software. You may need to verify the start status and, if necessary, restart the service. For example, if you notice an offline host in the Management Station but you know the watcher service is running, restarting the watcher service on that host might fix the problem.

The Speech Suite installer automatically configures and runs one instance of the watcher service on each host.

Whenever the watcher starts, it initializes with parameters that set in the Windows registry (see Configuring watcher and SNMP).

Controlling watcher: Windows

The watcher runs as Windows service, and starts automatically by default when the host starts. (The Startup type is automatic.)

To control the watcher service on a host, use the Windows Control Panel:  open the Windows Administrative Tools→Services window and operate on the Nuance Watcher Daemon.

Nuance recommends configuring the watcher to recover in the event of a failure. To do this:

  1. On Windows, open the Administrative Tools > Services window and display the Properties for the Nuance Watcher Daemon.
  2. On the Recovery tab, select a recovery action from the failure lists:
    • If you select Run a File, don’t specify a program or script that requires user input.
    • If you select Restart the Computer, click Restart Computer Options and specify a time to wait before restarting the computer. Optionally, write a message to display to users before the computer restarts.
  3. Click OK when done.

Controlling watcher: Linux

On Linux, the watcher service runs as the watcher-daemon process. To operate on the watcher, log on as root, and use any of these commands:

On CentOS 7:

> service nuance-watcher restart
> service nuance-watcher status
> service nuance-watcher stop
> service nuance-watcher emergencystop
> service nuance-watcher start

Alternatively, on CentOS 7:

> systemctl restart nuance-watcher
> systemctl status nuance-watcher
> systemctl stop nuance-watcher
> systemctl start nuance-watcher