Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring internet speeds

It seems like I’m having a week of requests. This one was requested by my friends at Datto. One of their clients wanted to have the ability to run speed-tests and have their RMM system generate alerts whenever the speed drops. I’ve made the following PowerShell script that uses the CLI utility from speedtest.net. This utility gives us some nice feedback to work with;

It returns the external IP & the internal IP for the interface used.
The current ISP.
The download and upload speed.
The Jitter,Latency, and packet loss of the connection.
and the server it uses, plus the actual speedtest.net URL so you can compare the results.

So, I’ve made the script use two different monitoring methods; one is absolute and based and the values you’ve entered. The other is a percentage based monitor that alerts if the difference between the current speedtest and the previous one is more than 20%.

The script

The script downloads the Speedtest utility from the speedtest website. You can always replace this URL with your own host if you’d like.

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######### Absolute monitoring values ##########
$maxpacketloss = 2 #how much % packetloss until we alert.
$MinimumDownloadSpeed = 100 #What is the minimum expected download speed in Mbit/ps
$MinimumUploadSpeed = 20 #What is the minimum expected upload speed in Mbit/ps
######### End absolute monitoring values ######

#Replace the Download URL to where you've uploaded the ZIP file yourself. We will only download this file once.
#Latest version can be found at: https://www.speedtest.net/nl/apps/cli
$DownloadURL = "https://bintray.com/ookla/download/download_file?file_path=ookla-speedtest-1.0.0-win64.zip"
$DownloadLocation = "$($Env:ProgramData)\SpeedtestCLI"
try {
$TestDownloadLocation = Test-Path $DownloadLocation
    if (!$TestDownloadLocation) {
new-item $DownloadLocation -ItemType Directory -force
        Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $DownloadURL -OutFile "$($DownloadLocation)\speedtest.zip"
        Expand-Archive "$($DownloadLocation)\speedtest.zip" -DestinationPath $DownloadLocation -Force
    }
}
catch {
    write-host "The download and extraction of SpeedtestCLI failed. Error: $($\_.Exception.Message)"
exit 1
}
$PreviousResults = if (test-path "$($DownloadLocation)\LastResults.txt") { get-content "$($DownloadLocation)\LastResults.txt" | ConvertFrom-Json }
$SpeedtestResults = & "$($DownloadLocation)\speedtest.exe" --format=json --accept-license --accept-gdpr
$SpeedtestResults | Out-File "$($DownloadLocation)\LastResults.txt" -Force
$SpeedtestResults = $SpeedtestResults | ConvertFrom-Json

#creating object
[PSCustomObject]$SpeedtestObj = @{
    downloadspeed = [math]::Round($SpeedtestResults.download.bandwidth / 1000000 _ 8, 2)
uploadspeed = [math]::Round($SpeedtestResults.upload.bandwidth / 1000000 _ 8, 2)
packetloss = [math]::Round($SpeedtestResults.packetLoss)
    isp           = $SpeedtestResults.isp
    ExternalIP    = $SpeedtestResults.interface.externalIp
    InternalIP    = $SpeedtestResults.interface.internalIp
    UsedServer    = $SpeedtestResults.server.host
    ResultsURL    = $SpeedtestResults.result.url
    Jitter        = [math]::Round($SpeedtestResults.ping.jitter)
Latency = [math]::Round($SpeedtestResults.ping.latency)
}
$SpeedtestHealth = @()
#Comparing against previous result. Alerting is download or upload differs more than 20%.
if ($PreviousResults) {
    if ($PreviousResults.download.bandwidth / $SpeedtestResults.download.bandwidth * 100 -le 80) { $SpeedtestHealth += "Download speed difference is more than 20%" }
    if ($PreviousResults.upload.bandwidth / $SpeedtestResults.upload.bandwidth \* 100 -le 80) { $SpeedtestHealth += "Upload speed difference is more than 20%" }
}

#Comparing against preset variables.
if ($SpeedtestObj.downloadspeed -lt $MinimumDownloadSpeed) { $SpeedtestHealth += "Download speed is lower than $MinimumDownloadSpeed Mbit/ps" }
if ($SpeedtestObj.uploadspeed -lt $MinimumUploadSpeed) { $SpeedtestHealth += "Upload speed is lower than $MinimumUploadSpeed Mbit/ps" }
if ($SpeedtestObj.packetloss -gt $MaxPacketLoss) { $SpeedtestHealth += "Packetloss is higher than $maxpacketloss%" }

if (!$SpeedtestHealth) {
$SpeedtestHealth = "Healthy"
}

And that is it! So this monitoring component will be uploaded to the ComStore soon. As always, Happy PowerShelling!