Mark Wragg - Blog | wragg.io - Mark Wragg - Blog

Cleaning up paused devices from PRTG with Powershell

9 minute read

One of our AWS based products uses auto-scaling and when new instances are deployed a script automatically creates sensors for them in PRTG (our monitoring tool). When the instances are scaled down/terminated there is not a script that automatically removes them from PRTG (in part so that we can temporarily retain the monitoring history). As a result, our monitoring over time can become cluttered with redundant paused devices, so a script was needed to automate the process of clearing those down.

Using Test-NetConnection to diagnose network connectivity

3 minute read

Powershell version 4 and Windows 8.1 / 2012 R2 introduced the Test-NetConnection command as a tool for performing network connectivity tests with Powershell. Test-NetConnection allows you to perform ping, traceroute and TCP port tests and from Windows 10 and Server 2016 onward introduces the ability to do “Diagnose Routing” tests with the same cmdlet.

Using Write-Progress to provide feedback in Powershell

2 minute read

I like my scripts to give feedback to the console to demonstrate progress where possible and Powershell provides a number of cmdlets to do this, one of which is Write-Progress.

Get Transaction Sensor URL settings from PRTG with Powershell

4 minute read

If you’re looking for a way to interrogate multiple HTTP Transaction Sensors in your PRTG monitoring installation using a script then this blog post is for you.

Get uptime from multiple servers with Powershell

2 minute read

The following script can be used to get the current uptime from a collection of servers in Active Directory using WMI. I used it as a way to audit our estate, keen to understand how long servers have been operational for, in part to identify those which were potentially not routinely receiving Windows Updates.

Synchronising Git repositories to disk with Chef

5 minute read

My team has an ever-growing collection of administration scripts and tools which are organised and maintained within a number of Git repositories. In order to ensure that the copies of these scripts in production always reflect the Master branch in Source Control we set up a Chef cookbook to synchronise the repositories to a network share in the environment. This post details how this functionality was developed and deployed.

Testing Active Directory with Pester and Powershell

4 minute read

Irwin Strachan published a Pester script for Operational Testing of Active Directory back in April which I was keen to try out. Afterwards I extended the script to add some additional health checks of Active Directory and this post explains how the resultant combination of our work can be used to validate your Active Directory.

Send notifications to Hipchat with Powershell #ChatOps

7 minute read

I recently implemented a Powershell module to send notifications in to our Hipchat rooms. This post explains how that script works and why this was an important shift for how we handle notifications.

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