I'm fairly sure this isn't possible but throwing it out there just in case.

I have two apps (C# desktop apps): an app the runs a process and produces results and a "controller" app that fires up multiple instances of the process app and aggregates their results. To achieve this, on start up, the process app fires up a self hosted WCF service on a dynamic port. It then reports that dynamic port back to the controller which can then use it to monitor it's collection of process apps and retrieve their results.

N.B. there can be multiple controller apps running simultaneously on a machine. This has worked fine until now because each knows about and controls its own set of process apps.

I am now being asked to provide an overall monitoring app that looks for ALL instances of the process app. It doesn't "own" any of these instances and won't know the port number that any of them are on.

Is there a way I can somehow connect to them? They will all share the same url but the port numbers will differ. I guess could just iterate all the possible ports but that feels very inefficient and I imagine might get detected as possibly malicious by anti-virus software etc. I can also find the processes easily using GetProcessByName but that's not enough to actually communicate with the instances.

Any thoughts?