Mini Post: 20 More Pulseway Alerts with PowerShell

Posted on July 2, 2015 • 2 minutes • 407 words

The Pitch

In my last post I showed how you could extend the possible alerts generated by Pulseway with PowerShell and Windows' Event Log.

The example used, checking to see if a disk was present within the operating system, was just the tip of the iceberg (and rather mundane.)

In this mini post I’ll list 20 more ideas for PowerShell fuelled Pulseway alerts.

Disclaimer from last post: Be careful about over saturating yourself with notifications. Set the appropriate notification level based on your needs and those of the business. If you’re getting flooded with alerts you could become desensitized to the really important ones.

RED ALERT

A new account has been added to the local administrators group!
A new local account has been created!
You have redundant internet links - and use BGP to keep services up - you’re running on your slower backup link!
One of your contractors has just logged onto a server! (But you don’t want notifications about staff logging into a server.)
Someone just installed the GUI onto your beautiful Server Core box!
Your external IP Address changed! (great for you home PC…)
New post on an RSS feed!
Your favorite website has been down for five minutes!
Your wireless mouse’s battery is running low/flat!
An update is available for your favorite text editor!
A game on your Steam wishlist is on sale!
Active Directory FSMO role holder has changed!
You forgot to change your password and now your account is locked out! (Better to alert that password is expiring that day, but this is funnier.)
A physical network interface in a Windows NIC Teaming interface has failed!
Someone turned Windows Firewall off on a server!
A new wireless SSID is being broadcast! (assuming monitored PC has a wireless interface.)
… And it’s an open/insecure wireless network!
Your Pester test cases failed! (Assuming you have so many that they take a while, our you just have some that take a while to complete.)
You save a PowerShell script an hour ago but didn’t push it to your repo!
You haven’t blogged in over a month, maybe you should get on that…

Closing Notes

As you can see you can literally alert on anything as long as PowerShell can get it’s hooks into it.

If you want to see any of these ideas fleshed out into a real script (and don’t know how to go about it yourself), let me know in the comments.