Reporting Progress with Powershell

Often in the life of an IT engineer or administrator, the command shell is a means of performing an operation on multiple items that would otherwise take a significant amount of time if performed via GUI tools. 
When planning for such operations, reporting on progress is a nice thing to have, since it may take a while for the entire operation to complete and we need to know if things are working out as expected.

In the majority of the cases, we know the actions that need to be taken in advance and thus the easiest way to go through them is to use a For loop.
With For we start processing the items in an array or list either from its start or end and work our way to the last item by incrementing, usually by one.

The Powershell code below will get the items in the current directory and sequentially process them, reporting the status of the operation after each item:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
# Get the list of items to process
$items = @(Get-ChildItem)

# Loop through the array
for($i = 0; $i -lt $items.count; $i++)
{
    # Report the current progress
    Write-Progress -Activity "Processing items." `
                   -Status "Working on $($items[$i].Name)." `
                   -PercentComplete ((100 * $i)/$items.count)

    # Create a long running operation
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 1
}

The loop in line 5 will have as many iterations as the number of elements in the array and in each iteration we're processing a different item of the array.

Each iteration also contains a Write-Progress command that shows/updates the respective progress bar. The most important parameters are:

  • Activity: The name of the batch operation.
  • Status: Information about the current iteration. Usually contains information to reference the item being processed.
  • PercentComplete: An integer indicating the completion percentage of the operation. This is calculated using the number of the current iteration and the total number of items to process. 
For the purpose of this demo, I'm not performing any operation on the items, instead I've added a command to delay the execution for one second at a time. This is where you'll place your code in similar tasks.

Running the above scriptblock in my home directory results in the below (hover over the image to animate):

The value of the the Activity parameter will be displayed on the top of the progress bar and below it will be the respective value of the Status parameter that changes with each iteration. 

This approach is great for reporting the progress of an operation which will take a while, however depending on the nature of the operation you may have to consider parallel execution in order to speed things up. For that reason, I've developed the Foreach-Object-Parallel cmdlet that aims to make the process of running parallel task easier.

More information on For is available here and on Write-Progress here.

Popular posts from this blog

Domain Controller Machine Password Reset

Image
On my lab environment, I've configured two Active Directory sites since most enterprises have offices in more that one places. My lab however is not running 24/7 and the domain controllers in the second site are rarely turned on in order to save resources. This leads to issues with the Active Directory replication such as the "The target principal name is incorrect" error when I execute:  repadmin /syncall /AdeP. To remedy the issue, we have to reset the machine password of the domain controller that has been offline. First off, we are going to stop and disable the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (kdc) service on the problematic domain controller, in our case DC4. There may be some tickets in the cache so we should also clear them using klist purge Now it's time to change the machine password of the domain controller using the command netdom resetpwd /s:dc3 /ud:lab\administrator /pd:* Replace the "lab\administrator" with an account on your
Keep reading

Configuring a Certificate on Exchange Receive Connector

Today's article is about configuring Exchange receive connectors with specific certificates. Out of the box, Exchange uses self signed certificates to provide TLS secured mail flow. This will definitely be an issue if you expose the SMTP protocol to client computers since they won't trust the certificate. In this article we are going to configure a certificate that was issued by a third part authority to the Client Frontend receive connector. We'll start with getting the thumbprint of the certificate using the Get-ExchangeCertificate cmdlet: [PS] C:\> Get-ExchangeCertificate Thumbprint                               Subject ----------                               ------- 241B864DC82C664FECBA18B8D54987AAFB65B4C2 CN=*.lab.com, ... D4D210886B34E690191A1F008C78FDD0E7325DD4 CN=Exchange2013A 960171662EB261162F9C8CBE12E0B75D6F06ABB0 CN=Microsoft Exchange Server Auth Certificate 2690324B827A9F2B75D59104F81CAAA57CDD627B CN=WMSvc-Exchange2013A [PS]
Keep reading

Running Multiple NGINX Ingress Controllers in AKS

Image
In some of the previous articles of this blog, we went through the process of installing NGINX as the Ingress Controller in AKS clusters. Either for applications that should be available directly from the public internet, or for applications that should only be accessed from networks considered internal. In the majority of the cases, however, and given that an AKS cluster is an environment that is designed to host multiple applications and provide economy at scale, additional ingress controllers may be required. In this post, we're going to go through the process of deploying an additional NGINX ingress controller that is going to be used for internal applications. The below diagram depicts the desired outcome: The Angular application is published via the public NGINX through the Azure Load Balancer that has been assigned a public IP. The .NET app is published by a different set of NGINX pods that are deployed in a different namespace and their ingress controller service is connect
Keep reading