Earlier while troubleshooting an issue for a customer I needed to start at the bare minimum of troubleshooting because the issue at hand was a bit out of my area of expertise. The problem as reported existed on a Windows 2003 R2 server running backup software called Retrospect. The backup software was reporting via email to the IT staff that it was no longer working and they needed me to locate the issue and resolve. The first thing I needed to do was to see how long the server had been up, if any patches had been applied recently, and if anything else had changed since the last successful backup. Again since this is out of my area of expertise I first needed to see how long the server had been up which luckily is almost as easy to do on Windows 2003 R2 as it is on Linux. Below I provide to examples of how to check server uptime on Windows.
Check Windows 2003 R2 Server Uptime Using systeminfo:
Open up a Command Prompt and type “systeminfo” as shown in the below example image. It will take a little bit of time for the statistics to be compiled and then spit out to the Command Prompt window so be patient.
Once the results are output to the Command Prompt window you will likely have to scroll back up to locate the portion of the output titled “System Up Time” as shown in the below example image.
Windows Server 2003 R2 System Up Time Via systeminfo:
Another method to obtain Windows server up time is by using the “net stats srv” command. While it doesn’t spit out as much information or specifically state System Up Time it does provide statistics since the server has been up and as you will notice in the below example it will provide you the date at which statistics have been tracked from.
Check Windows 2003 R2 Server Uptime Using net stats srv:
Either of the above methods should provide you with a quick view of the amount of time the Windows server in question has been up which can assist with troubleshooting other problems.
