Professional Windows® PowerShell

Chapter 15. Using Windows PowerShell Tools for Discovery

One of PowerShell's goals is to enable system administrators to find out what is happening on one system or, more usefully, on large numbers of systems. In this chapter, I explore techniques that allow you to use Windows PowerShell to find out what is happening on a system.

Of course, PowerShell isn't the only tool available to explore a Windows system. There are many other tools available from Microsoft and elsewhere that allow you to explore at least some aspects of what a system is doing. PowerShell is one tool in an armory, not the whole arsenal. But it's a very useful tool for exploration, partly for what it can do, partly for the convenient and interactive way that you can explore a system from the command line.

For example, if a machine has been showing sluggish performance, you might want to know what processes are running, how much CPU time they are using, and how much memory they are using. You can find out much of that information from Windows Task Manager, but it can be tedious either to scroll around within that utility's pretty constricted interface to change the columns to be displayed, or to scroll around an uncomfortably large number of columns to see the information you want. PowerShell lets you select and filter the information you want, display the parts of it that interest you onscreen and, if you want, send exactly the information you chose for your purposes to a file.

Similarly, you might want to know ...