With the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems being the most commonly used operating system in the world, experience with PowerShell is invaluable. The official definition for PowerShell from Microsoft is “a cross-platform task automation solution made up of a command-line shell, a scripting language, and a configuration management framework”. PowerShell also runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
If you have already worked with Command Prompt (CMD) in Windows, you will be able to pick up the basics of PowerShell fairly quickly. The majority of CMD commands are natively supported in PowerShell and some are even expanded upon using PowerShell’s new syntax and behavior. There are many basic commands you can utilize with PowerShell to get familiar with the syntax and play around with ideas for tasks that you wish to accomplish.
Throughout my tenure in systems administration, PowerShell has proven to be a transformative asset, significantly enhancing my ability to manage and boost productivity within Windows OS-based environments. To provide insight into the practical capabilities of PowerShell, here are some tangible examples of real-world business applications and projects that I’ve successfully developed using the scripting language:
- Automated Employee Offboarding
With many business utilizing Active Directory and/or Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) PowerShell offers incredible ways to automatically offboard employees once they’ve separated. PowerShell’s scripting language allows you to pull user data from Active Directory and/or Entra ID which then can be used to perform actions based off of the criteria that you specify. In myself implementing an automated offboarding PowerShell script solution for a sizable environment (1500+ employees), the offboarding time was reduced by 80%. This efficiency gain was achieved as the PowerShell script seamlessly automated the labor-intensive tasks that were previously performed manually by employees during every termination process.
- Behavior / Service Monitoring
Utilizing the native Task Scheduler in Windows OS, PowerShell scripts can be scheduled to run systematically, facilitating the extraction of data from various services and monitoring specific anomalies. A real world example I experienced involves a scenario where a firewall utilized a service account in Active Directory within an environment with five domain controllers. In the event of a lockout, determining which Domain Controller processed the request and locked out the account required examining event logs from each server. To streamline this process, I developed a script scheduled through Task Scheduler to run every 5 minutes. The script would promptly check for account lockouts, and upon detection, efficiently collect the relevant event logs from all Domain Controllers, providing the necessary information through a single pane of glass. This sped up troubleshooting time tremendously and ensured if this happened again, we could just re-enable the task to monitor abnormal behavior.
In conclusion, my admiration for PowerShell extends beyond its technical capabilities—it’s the linchpin that transforms complex administrative tasks into streamlined, automated processes. Whether orchestrating seamless employee offboarding, extracting crucial data from diverse services, or swiftly resolving account lockouts across multiple domain controllers, PowerShell consistently proves itself as an indispensable ally in the realm of Windows systems administration. Its versatility, efficiency gains, and seamless integration with Windows OS make it a tool that not only simplifies my daily responsibilities but elevates my overall approach to IT management. PowerShell stands as a testament to innovation, empowering me to be a more efficient administrator day to day.
Stay tuned for some PowerShell tutorials, if you would like to know about my day to day setup working with PowerShell scripting, please click here: https://greenetech.org/my-powershell-scripting-setup/