Book Image

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp

By : Brenton J.W. Blawat
Book Image

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp

By: Brenton J.W. Blawat

Overview of this book

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp explains how to create your own repeatable PowerShell scripting framework. This framework contains script logging methodologies, answer file interactions, and string encryption and decryption strategies. This book focuses on evaluating individual components to identify the system’s function, role, and unique characteristics. To do this, you will leverage built-in CMDlets and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to explore Windows services, Windows processes, Windows features, scheduled tasks, and disk statistics. You will also create custom functions to perform a deep search for specific strings in files and evaluate installed software through executable properties. We will then discuss different scripting techniques to improve the efficiency of scripts. By leveraging several small changes to your code, you can increase the execution performance by over 130%. By the end of this book, you will be able to tie all of the concepts together in a PowerShell-based Windows server scanning script. This discovery script will be able to scan a Windows server to identify a multitude of components.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
3
Working with Answer Files
Index

Chapter 6. Evaluating Scheduled Tasks

Enterprises leverage scheduled tasks for a multitude of purposes. Whether it is to process business transactions or to provide health checks, they have become the standard for running actions on a scheduled basis. Scheduled tasks are flexible, in that they can also be run on logon, after a certain event is triggered, or even manually. Scheduled tasks can run executables, or even start scripts to extend limitless possibilities for automation.

Due to the wide variety of uses for scheduled tasks, it's important to scan them with the Windows server scanning script. This will help you identify processes that only run on a triggered or scheduled basis, such as a quarterly report or a nightly process. It can also be used to identify alternate user accounts that are used to run these scheduled tasks. Since scheduled tasks are so flexible, it's essential to capture what the scheduled tasks are doing, how they are invoked, and what account is designated to run...