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Monitoring an Internet Connection using Python

When RaspberryPi 3+ first came out after playing with sensors and an Arduino Uno board for a while, I used it for monitoring wireless and internet connections in different premises. Thanks to the compact size and the low power needed it was the best tool.  I thought it would be interesting to know how consistent was the available bandwidth was during the day and eventually know if there were some unnoticed outages happening.

During these years I’ve used similar utilities, but I decided to write and share with you a simpler script that could be implemented quickly and help you to achieve similar results regardless that you run it inside a docker container, virtual machine or raspberry pi.

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How to monitor a printer with Powershell

When it comes to monitoring, as much I like scripting languages, it is never my first choice to rely only on a ‘custom’ script. Considering how many variables are involved: requirements, environments, the overall experience of the team that will manage that piece of software, and all efforts to develop, test, and support the solution over time.

I prefer the implementation of any monitoring solution with basic out-of-the-box features and add on top some scripts if required to reduce the overall codebase to read/maintain. It is not only an early optimisation of a cost/benefit analysis, but it is derived from my professional experiences in different companies and a consideration of the balance needed between the business goal/expectation and the technical value offered by the suggested solution.

In this article you will find something totally different, I wanted to take the opportunity of helping somebody to solve a real case of a Virtual Printer that was causing issues to users and the ops team. The printer needed to be monitored with a living-off-the-land approach, so without adding any software solution but just a few scripts.

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Using PowerShell to Clean Up Sophos Temp Files

using-powershell-to-clean-up-sophos-temp-files

Recently I’ve encountered a strange issue that affected one Windows workstation with Sophos AV (Endpoint) software installed.  Sometimes this software creates some temporary files with ‘$$$’ extension and apparently it never removes them.

I thought that the process of analysis and implementing a solution for this edge case was perfect for an article and it is applicable to many similar situations when scripting is required to collect information or mitigate.

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Monitoring the Network Load with Powershell

monitoring-the-network-load-with-powershell

Monitoring is an important activity in IT operations, it’s essential for correlating the state of all the moving parts of our systems and applications and create a big picture of the health of the whole environment.  Before going down the rabbit hole of complicated monitoring tools and techniques let’s start with define a that monitoring can be subjective and on a case-by-case can be very basic or detailed and can let you choose a specific tool or strategy. There is no one-size-fits-all. This week I needed to implement a custom check to monitor the network load/usage on any Windows OS and instead of looking for a third-party tool and deploying maybe another agent on servers I wrote a Powershell script to perform this activity.

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