A systems administrator is troubleshooting an in-house application that became unavailable after a scheduled weekend maintenance window. The administrator observes that the primary application service is stopped and will not start. The service's properties show a dependency on a database service. When attempting to start the dependent database service manually, it fails. The system event log shows an error for the database service with the description, "The service failed to start due to a logon failure." What is the MOST likely cause of this service failure?
The password for the database service's user account was recently changed but not updated in the service's "Log On" properties.
A misconfigured firewall is blocking the network port used by the database.
The application service is not configured with the correct dependency on the database service.
An OS patch applied during maintenance is incompatible with the database service.
The correct answer is that the service account's password was not updated. The key piece of information is the event log message: "The service failed to start due to a logon failure." This error specifically indicates that the credentials used by the service to authenticate are incorrect. This commonly happens when a service account's password is changed in Active Directory (e.g., due to password expiration policies) but is not updated in the 'Log On' tab of the service's properties.
An incompatible OS patch would likely cause a different error, such as the service crashing or specific application errors, not a logon failure.
A firewall issue would typically allow the service to start but would prevent network connections, leading to connectivity errors rather than a failure to start due to logon problems.
An incorrect dependency configuration is ruled out because the scenario explicitly states that the administrator checked the service properties and confirmed the dependency.