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Identifying IP Owners

July 29, 2025

Aleksandar Nikolić and Dr. Tobias Weltner

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The 2026 Microsoft Automation Benchmark
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Summary

As automation becomes more business-critical, DIY scripts can create hidden responsibilities around security, governance, maintenance, and scalability. This article explores the real cost of managing automation in-house and when a dedicated platform can help IT teams reduce that burden and scale more reliably.

When managing networks, you may encounter unknown IPaddresses. In such cases, it is crucial to quickly identify their owners. Oneway to do this is by querying the IP registration.

There is no built-in cmdlet for this, but with a quickcustom function—and the help of a free web service—you can create such acommand:

function Get-IPAddressRegistration
{
  param
  (
    [Parameter(Mandatory, ValueFromPipeline)]
    [string]
    $IpAddress
  )
  
  process
  {
    Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "http://ipinfo.io/$IpAddress/json" -UseBasicParsing |
      Select-Object -Property Ip, HostName, Org, @{N='Location';E={$_.city, $_.region, $_.country -join ','}}
  }
}

Next time you encounter an unknown IP address, simply query it:

PS C:\> Get-IPAddressRegistration 3.124.231.171

ip            hostname              org                      Location                  
--            --------              ---                      --------                  
3.124.231.171 bremen.jweiland.cloud AS16509 Amazon.com, Inc. Frankfurt am Main,Hesse,DE

You can also query multiple addresses at once:

PS C:\> '8.8.8.8', '1.1.1.1', '3.124.231.171' | Get-IPAddressRegistration

ip            hostname              org                      Location                   
--            --------              ---                      --------                   
8.8.8.8       dns.google            AS15169 Google LLC       Mountain View,California,US
1.1.1.1       one.one.one.one       AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. Brisbane,Queensland,AU     
3.124.231.171 bremen.jweiland.cloud AS16509 Amazon.com, Inc. Frankfurt am Main,Hesse,DE

Note that the underlying free web service has a throttle limit. If you need to query large numbers of IP addresses in a short period, you may need to switch to the paid tier.

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