New Training: Monitor Windows Performance Counters and Event Logs with PowerShell

In this 10-video, PowerShell training, CBT Nuggets trainer Trevor Sullivan covers how to use PowerShell to explore Windows Event Logs and gather performance data from the Windows operating system.

Watch this new PowerShell training.

The Windows operating system exposes log information via a standard interface called Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). You can hook into this log stream by using both PowerShell by itself, as well as the Windows Task Scheduler. When certain events occur — for example, a driver failure or network connectivity error — you can automatically trigger a response to that event.

The actions you perform in response to an event are up to you. You can automatically generate a ticket in your ticketing system, you can send a message to a Slack incoming webhook endpoint, or you can automatically restart a service. Virtually anything is possible with PowerShell, only limited by your creativity.

PowerShell acts as "glue code" between the ETW interface and other systems that you'd like to integrate with. As long as there's a REST API, or some other standard interface to your target system, PowerShell can help you respond to system events instantaneously.

This training includes:

• 10 videos

• 1.5 hour of training

Watch a video from the series:

Why Learn PowerShell and Windows Performance Counters?

If you're responsible for monitoring the performance of Microsoft Windows servers, it is essential that you understand the performance monitoring subsystem. The performance monitoring subsystem in Windows exposes a standard interface for retrieving metric data about both hardware and software components.

Using PowerShell, you can automate the retrieval of performance metrics on the Windows platform, using the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and Common Information Model (CIM) cmdlets. Instead of relying on third party software, such as InfluxData's open source Telegraf agent, you can write your own custom integrations between Windows performance metrics and data storage mechanism of your choosing.

If you're not interested in writing a custom storage integration, you can build your own display interface for real-time metrics as well. You could combine your knowledge of building terminal user interfaces and retrieving Windows performance metrics with PowerShell, to display this information right inside your terminal!

Start learning PowerShell today!