PowerShell Performance Diagnostics Utility

SCENARIO: You want to be able to create, start, stop, and delete Performance Monitor data collector sets and collect logs from your computer using a menu.  You can do all of these things manually, but this script will present you with a menu for performing these tasks.

NOTE: This will work in Windows 10.  If you are running on an older version of PowerShell, you will need to change Get-CimInstance cmdlet along with the Get-GPResultantSetOfPolicy cmdlet.

UPDATE: 11-06-2017 - I just pasted a newer version of this script below.

Click Here to Download Script: Data Collection Utility

Folder Structure:

Powershell Script: Copy files from multiple source directories

While you can create a package or application that copies config files out to your clients after an install, there may be times when it's easier to just use a PowerShell script to copy configuration files to your client machines.

This was true in our case where we had to copy files from different source directories depending on the name of the computer.  In our case, we had to copy a different configuration file to C:\Program Files (x86)\application\ depending on which site that computer was at.  Our computers have a four digit site identifier at the beginning so we leveraged this in order to do the file copy.

You can modify the script to accommodate your computer name scheme.

Force Mozilla Firefox to "Always Activate" Java

Scenario

You have installed the most recent version of Java, but when you check the Add-on Manager in Mozilla Firefox, you see that the Java Plugin defaults to "Ask to Activate".  Typically you should probably leave it at "Ask to Activate" for security reasons, but if you want it to default to "Always Activate" you can do this either per user or per machine.

Create Perfmon on Remote Machines

Scenario: You want to start perfmon on several remote machines.  You have a list of machines, but you don't want to remotely create and start those perfmon data collector sets.

Here is a PowerShell script that you can use to start up perfmon data collector sets on a remote machine.  It pulls the list of computers from a .csv file called "computers.csv".  Your .csv should looks something like this:

Highly Available 2008 R2 RDS Infrastructure

SCENARIO: Deploy highly available 2008 R2 Connection Broker. There are different ways to do this, but in our scenario, we will cluster the connection broker server, create a shared cluster service, and use NLB to balance the initial connection load on the session hosts.

PREREQUISITES:

SESSION HOSTS
2 Server 2008 R2 Servers with Session Host Roll installed
Session Host servers should have two NIC's (One for RDP and the other for NLB)

CONNECTION BROKERS
2 Server 2008 R2 servers with Connection Broker Roll installed.

Ensure that all servers are members of the same domain.
Ensure that all servers are able to communicate with each other (work out subnet / VLAN issues if any exist)

STEPS OVERVIEW
1. Install Failover Cluster feature on Connection Brokers
2. Create drive / folder for quorum drive (this is for failover clustering and in this example we will use a folder)
3. Create share cluster service.
4. Install NLB on Session Hosts.
5. Configure NLB on Session Hosts.
6. Create Session Host Farm.
7. Create appropriate DNS entries.

Using Perfmon to Analyze High CPU Usage.

Scenario

Your CPU utilization is maxing out and you want to find how what is responsible for the high CPU.  Sometimes the process is obvious in that you can look at task manager to see who is using the most CPU, but that alone doesn't give you a snapshot of what is happening on your server over a period of time.

To begin, use the instructions from this article to capture perfmon data while you are experiencing the high CPU state.  Let it capture a decent amount of time so that you can see trends.

After you capture the perfmon data, open it up by double clicking on the appropriate .blg file in the C:\Perflogs folder.  You should see something like the above image.  Unfortunately, this image isn't terribly helpful.  So we will need to remove all the counters and then start by adding counters systematically.

Creating Secure Personal Drive Space

Scenario

Your job has given you a "work laptop" that you also use (legitimately, of course) for your own occasional personal computing, so you've amassed some personal files over the course of your employment. Now suppose that computer got taken away from you before you had a chance to get those files off? Perhaps one day you walk into your office and find a brand new laptop waiting for you. Cool! Except - where is your old one? "Don't worry!" says Helpful I.T. Guy, "All your work files are on the network, just log in to this new one and you'll have them." Yes, but were your personal files deleted? And if not, does the person who now has your old computer have access to those files?

That's not an unlikely scenario - and worse ones can be imagined. What if one day your HR rep walks in with a security guard to announce that you've been downsized - "Stop what you're doing on that computer, gather your personal belongings, and come with us." Now what?

In this article I will explain my setup for avoiding issues like this. In reality the entire setup is fairly straightforward and not very time consuming, it actually took me several times longer to write the article than to do the setup! So don't be afraid to jump in.

Memory Leaks in Nonpaged Pool

Found this video on Youtube.  It's a good introduction to finding nonpaged pool memory leaks. This really isn't as much of a problem in Windows Server 2008 R2 and above, but good information here.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/177415

How to Enable Procmon Boot Logging with Script

Scenario:

In order to use Procmon to log operations on boot up, you have to go to Options and then select Enable Boot Logging. Once you have done that, you can reboot your computer, logon to your computer, launch Procmon again, and then you can save the boot log.  There may be an occasion when you want to enable it on multiple machines using a script.  This is not something that you can do given the current command line arguments.

Using Analytic and Debug Logs

It's common for IT administrators to use the native Windows logs to search for problems.  Two of the most commonly used logs are the "System" and the "Application" logs.  However, not everyone takes advantage of the the other built in operational logs.  When you go to event viewer, you can expand "Applications and Services Logs" to reveal a vast array of logs. Many of them are empty, but many of them are capturing useful data that can help you discover what is going on with your computer.

For more information on what each of these logs and log types are visit this link https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc722404.aspx

In this post, I want to talk about the analytic and debug logs.  The Windows Logs give you information across your system.  It will show you hardware events, system events, security events, application events, etc.  It will do this for all sorts of components and application.  The Applications and Services Logs will drill into individual components and report only on those.