monitoring | Scripting Library

One of the most basic and repetitive tasks for system administrators is certainly unlocking Active Directory user accounts. It’s very easy to underestimate it, in fact, this operation isn’t perceived not just by users, but more importantly by junior engineers not important at all! Frequently providing some general feedback to the user on this issue or simply a response that this issue is now it’s been fixed.
On top of that, I’ve found that in some situation finding the root cause it requires a bit of investigation and experience not just to guess what more likely is causing it and not many of us are willing to take this effort. But I like to explain and document what happened to the user, to me it’s absolutely key to raise the awareness and trust people and processes involved in the IT System. Continue reading “Powershell: Monitoring AD Account Lock-Out Events”

Nagios is a very powerful open source tool for monitoring networks and infrastructures. The number of plugins available on Nagios Exchange and extensions make this tool essential to not just to be reactive but to create workflows and escalations if needed in a matter of minutes.
The installation and configuration of this tool under a major linux distributions is not difficult.

The default tool for monitoring a Windows network are SCCM/SCOM and OMS, but if your environment is a mixed environment I think personally that Nagios can be considered a safe bet!

NSClient++ is the agent needed for performing some interesting checks on windows and you can leverage your powershell scripting ability to perform custom checks on the environment. Continue reading “PowerShell, Nagios and NSClient++”