How to establish simple server monitoring via PowerShell

• Performance
• Process utilization
• Memory and CPU usage
• Network and user activity
• Server response times
• Tread utilization
• Bandwidth and throughput

This list isn’t exhaustive, but should be a decent starting point. Reaching a consensus on focus areas is essential — even when creating simple monitors. Say we want to stray from heavy metrics, however. Telemetry data is useful, yet it might be too detailed for your purposes.

You must also create a basic chain of escalation: what issues, at what severity, will grab whose attention? PowerShell scripts trigger a pre-determined action, which leads to a desired result. This is often called a state. If a bad state is discovered—like an incorrect response—someone must be notified.

This might be someone on the IT side, DevOps side, or even technical higher-ups. One person might be enough to mitigate the issue. Multiple employees might have to extinguish a fire. Prompt alerting via PowerShell can help resolve hiccups faster.

• Get
• Test

Each cmdlet also includes a modifier, which provides context for the request. This is connected to the cmdlet by a dash, e.g. Get-Service -ComputerName. If you want to test your server’s functionality, you may elect to code something like Test-HTTP. These cmdlets are preceded by function notation, so that one’s first line may look like this:

function Test-HTTP {

Functions also include parameters. If you don’t define parameters for your servers, then your PowerShell scripts won’t discern between different outputs. These general functions will return general results. Properly defining parameters (like computer names, good responses, or bad responses) will ensure your monitoring output is contextually informative.

If you want to define a positive response, such as an HTTP status code, you’ll have to denote this as an integer ([int]). Such codes might be 200 (successful, OK response), 202 (accepted, but waiting), or anything else related to server functionality. Because servers ultimately respond to API requests, it’s useful to design a monitoring function that confirms healthy responses. You’ll also need to include strings ([string]) to denote key monitoring objects or data types.

What a basic HTTP response test function might look like. Courtesy of Adam the Automator.

You’ll also want to validate and bake condition statements into your PowerShell functions. This will instruct your server to produce certain outputs—should statuses be true or false. PowerShell will follow these instructions accordingly, and return a valuable result to you or your team.