monitoring | Scripting Library

May 19, 2020May 26, 2020

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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February 13, 2020February 14, 2020

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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August 26, 2019September 9, 2019

Apache Is A Swiss Army Knife

There are tools that are extremely useful and once configured properly will last a long time with little or no maintenance required at all. Web servers are a common example of tools that come to my mind that can be a swiss-army knife and serve a lot of purposes.

Whether you choose Apache, Nginx or IIS, just to pick some of the most famous ones, it’s very important to know at least most of the features that they offer. So it’s very important to get familiar with at least one of them, reading the documentation and start experimenting a bit.

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November 2, 2018May 20, 2019

Powershell: Monitoring AD Account Lock-Out Events

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”