This time I’m tackling two blogs in one go again as both are fairly small and straightforward.

Monitoring user Experience

So I’ve been focussed on a lot of documentation, server, and office365 issues lately and I was kind of ‘forgetting’ to also blog about another key experience indicator users have; their own workstation.

Monitoring workstations is becoming more and more important with the flow of users into cloud environments. Just monitoring RAM, CPU, Disk space, etc is no longer really a thing you should focus on. These days you should be looking more into security monitoring and user experience. I’ve blogged about the Windows Experience Index and Diskspeed before as early indicators something might be wrong.

This time we’re going to delve a little deeper into experience monitoring; specifically application crashes and hangs. Windows has an internal monitoring system for this called the “System Reliability Index”. Each time a application hang, or crash occurs this is logged to the index. We can retrieve this information using PowerShell to report on with our RMM.

Windows Reliability script

$ExpectedIndex = "6.0"
$ExpectedTimetoRun = (get-date).AddDays(-1)
$Metrics = Get-CimInstance -ClassName win32_reliabilitystabilitymetrics | Select-Object -First 1
$Records = Get-CimInstance -ClassName win32_reliabilityRecords | Where-Object { $_.TimeGenerated -gt $Metrics.StartMeasurementDate }

$CombinedMetrics = [PSCustomObject]@{
    SystemStabilityIndex = $Metrics.SystemStabilityIndex
    'Start Date'         = $Metrics.StartMeasurementDate
    'End Date'           = $Metrics.EndMeasurementDate
    'Stability Records'  = $Records
}

if ($CombinedMetrics.SystemStabilityIndex -lt $ExpectedIndex) { 
    write-host "The system stability index is higher than expected. This computer might not be performing in an optimal state. The following records have been found:"
    $CombinedMetrics.'Stability Records'
}

if ($CombinedMetrics.'Start Date' -lt $ExpectedTimetoRun) {
    write-host "The system stability index has not been updated since $($CombinedMetrics.'Start Date'). This could indicate an issue with event logging or WMI."
}

So this script actually helps you out in finding where applications are crashing or hanging often. This should help you localize workstations that are performing poorly and are giving a bad user experience. The great thing is that this also monitors those pesky “Outlook is not responding” issues as these are logged too.

Unifi EOL monitoring

So this one was request by a friend that quickly wanted to find all his unsupported devices for replacement. Replace the URL and credentials with your own and you should be good to go. 🙂

##########
#Find EOL devices
$UnifiBaseUri = "https://yoururl:8443/api"
$UnifiUser = "APIUSER"
$UnifiPassword = "appassword"
##############
$UniFiCredentials = @{
    username = $UnifiUser
    password = $UnifiPassword
    remember = $true
} | ConvertTo-Json
 
 
write-host "Logging in to Unifi API." -ForegroundColor Green
try {
    Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "$UnifiBaseUri/login" -Method POST -Body $uniFiCredentials -SessionVariable websession
}
catch {
    write-host "Failed to log in on the Unifi API. Error was: $($_.Exception.Message)" -ForegroundColor Red
}
write-host "Collecting sites from Unifi API." -ForegroundColor Green
try {
    $sites = (Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "$UnifiBaseUri/self/sites" -WebSession $websession).data
}
catch {
    write-host "Failed to collect the sites. Error was: $($_.Exception.Message)" -ForegroundColor Red
}
 
$AllDevices = foreach ($site in $sites) {
    $Devices = (Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "$UnifiBaseUri/s/$($site.name)/stat/device" -WebSession $websession).data
    $Devices | Select-Object _id, name, ip, mac, model, type, version, unsupported,@{label = 'site'; expression = { $site.desc } }
}

$AllDevices | Where-Object { $_.unsupported -ne $false } | Out-GridView

And that’s it! As always, happy PowerShelling!