Category Archives: Automation

Deploying Auto-VPN or Always-On VPN with SSTP

1 Reply

Hi All,

Sorry for the break in blogs about monitoring – I’ve been quite busy with work, so I haven’t had the time to create a monitoring blog. I have been able to create a blog about deploying Always-on VPN, or as Microsoft used to call it “Auto-VPN”. Always-on VPN is going to be the replacement for DirectAccess. DirectAccess was a technology that created 2 hidden VPN tunnels over SSL and encrypted all the data between your client machine and your local network. The downside was that it required Windows Enterprise.

Warning: Long read 🙂
Continue reading →

Monitoring with PowerShell Chapter 2: DHCP Pool status

Leave a reply

Hi All,

As I’ve explained in my previous the series is taking a bit of a turn here and we’re going to start some blogs about remediation instead of just monitoring. I’ll link back to a previous blog and will explain how we automatically react to these issues within our RMM, if you do not have an RMM – Don’t worry! We’ll include the monitoring + remediation script so you can combine the scripts any way you’d like.

The second monitoring and remediation we’re getting on is a full DHCP-scope and auto-remediate when the scope is completely full. We’ll monitoring several aspects such as the amount of free IP’s, the scope status and lease-time, we’ll also try to clean the scope if it reaches a full state for very old leases or BAD_ADDR’s. Remember that if you bump into this issue a lot it’s better to increase scope size or manage your devices and network 🙂

Continue reading →

Monitoring with PowerShell Chapter 2: Hyper-V replication and remediation

Leave a reply

Hi All,

As I’ve explained in my previous the series is taking a bit of a turn here and we’re going to start some blogs about remediation instead of just monitoring. I’ll link back to a previous blog and will explain how we automatically react to these issues within our RMM, if you do not have an RMM – Don’t worry! We’ll include the monitoring + remediation script so you can combine the scripts any way you’d like.

The first monitoring and remediation we’re getting on is Hyper-V replication, where we will try to resolve the replication if the server was unreachable for some time, force a resync, and clear the statistics.

Continue reading →

Monitoring with PowerShell Chapter 2: Monitoring Windows Activation State

Leave a reply

Hi All,
Today we will be focusing on monitoring the status of the Windows and office activation status, we use an imaging application to supply all of our machines with the correct version of Windows, but sometimes its forgotten to actually activate the OS. This script checks the current activation status and alerts on it.

Continue reading →

Monitoring with PowerShell Chapter 2: Monitor RDS Security and Licensing status

1 Reply

Hi All,

Today we will be focusing on monitoring the RDS Security layer and licensing status, we often have RDS deployments in which a small oversight happens or the RD-Licensing information is lost. We’ll run a PowerShell script to check if the licensing is set-up correctly, and in what license mode we are running, it will also give us feedback if SSL and NLA are not enabled.
Continue reading →

Monitoring with PowerShell Chapter 2: Monitoring Anti-virus installation status

Leave a reply

Hi All,
Today we will be focusing on monitoring the anti-virus status of computers or servers that communicate with the Microsoft Security Center, The Security Center WMI Namespace actually has a lot of information about the current state of all security products, as long as they integrate and communicate with WMI.

Continue reading →

Monitoring with PowerShell Chapter 2: Monitoring Compellent SANs

1 Reply

Hi All,
Today we will be focusing on monitoring the Compellent SAN status from a single server, Most Compellents are delivered with Dell’s Co-Pilot functionality and do not require you to monitor it yourself, but I also enjoy having an extra set of eyes on my shared storage – Also in some security restricted environments we cannot use the Co-pilot functionality and have to rely on our own monitoring sets.
Continue reading →

Blog Series: Monitoring with PowerShell Chapter 2

Leave a reply

Hi All,

As the last series of blogs was so well received I’ve decided to continue the trend and make some new blogs about monitoring using PowerShell. I’ll be showing some examples on how monitoring could work in your RMM-suite and will include examples for major RMM suppliers such as Solarwinds.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new series of Monitoring with PowerShell, in the start of Chapter 2 we will be focusing on leveraging PowerShell to monitor external hardware such as Compellent SANs, the status of known exploits such as now famous Meltdown/SPECTRE, and SSL certificates, near the end of this series we will be shifting the focus from monitoring to automated remediation when an issue is found.

I hope you will enjoy the next series of blogs and if you have any questions feel free to drop a comment below.

Blog Series: Monitoring using PowerShell: Part Eight – Monitoring health with PowerShell

Leave a reply

Hi All,

My next couple of blogs will be a series of blogs where I will be explaining on how to use PowerShell for the monitoring of critical infrastructure. I will be releasing a blog every day that will touch on how to monitor specific software components, but also network devices from Ubiquity, third-party API’s and Office365. I will also be showing how you can integrate this monitoring in current RMM packages such as Solarwinds N-Central, Solarwinds RMM MSP and even include the required files to import the  monitoring set directly into your system.

Continue reading →

Blog Series: Monitoring using PowerShell: Part Seven – Monitoring back-ups with PowerShell

1 Reply

Hi All,

My next couple of blogs will be a series of blogs where I will be explaining on how to use PowerShell for the monitoring of critical infrastructure. I will be releasing a blog every day that will touch on how to monitor specific software components, but also network devices from Ubiquity, third-party API’s and Office365. I will also be showing how you can integrate this monitoring in current RMM packages such as Solarwinds N-Central, Solarwinds RMM MSP and even include the required files to import the  monitoring set directly into your system.

Continue reading →