Note: Portions of this blog are taken from an old blog post titled “Reference the Event That Triggered Your Task” This example will demonstrate both how to trigger (launch) a PowerShell script from a specific Windows Event, AND pass parameters...

Note: Remember, this is a “Quick and Dirty” solution. In fact, because credentials are hard-coded in the script, it is “Quick and Filthy”. But that tends to be the nature of IT-Pro quick fixes, and I found it useful for a particular...

The following are a list of commands that I demonstrated at TechEd 2010 in New Orleans. Actually I should say that I intended to demo these commands, but wasn’t able to complete the entire list due to a conference wide network outage. :-( Many...

Note: The solution below only pretains to new installations of Windows Vista+ since specific Diagnostics-Performance events are only repeated a small number of times before stopping. In addition, solutions to these events vary and depend on the source...

Security events are different than other Windows events because they require a special level of authentication/credentials in order to read or forward these events. Different configurations are required depending on which Windows platform is the client...

Since virtual machines can be easily moved between physical hosts (parents), it becomes important to track where virtual machines are physically residing for both asset management as well as troubleshooting purposes. The following post focuses on discovering...

One of the least known yet most powerful management features to ship with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 is built-in Event Forwarding which enables large scale health and state monitoring of a Windows environment (assuming health and state can...

Task Scheduler 2.0 (which shipped with Vista and Windows Server 2008) is a complete re-write of the built-in Windows Task Scheduler. Task Scheduler 2.0 is a fantastic automation tool that includes new powerful triggers like "from Event". From a task's...

The other day Mark noticed that redirections for our http://www.sysinternals.com/ URL were intermittently failing. In order to get more objective data, I built a script that tested the URL every 5 seconds, and reported back Success or Failure as well...

PsInfo is great for gathering asset information from Windows computers, both locally and remotely. PowerShell is great for automation and cleaning up output (among other things) as well as working with database driven data. The following examples show...

The Windows Task Scheduler as been completely re-written for Windows Vista to be a very powerful automation tool. The Task Scheduler now has the ability to launch tasks from a wide variety of useful triggers rather than being limited to the standard time...

WS-Man (Windows Remote Management) is a new protocol and framework first delivered in Windows 2003 R2 and is more prevalent in Windows Vista and beyond. There's an easy way to test WS-Man reachability that is similar to the network ping concept by...

In Vista, a lot of instrumentation, configuration, and utilization information is exposed via WS-Man. Vista WS-Man (aka: WS-Management, Windows Remote Management, and WinRM) incorporates many features, but I like to think of it as the management protocol...