Christos Polydorou

Writing your own queries for OMS is great, it gives you the flexibility to get the data in the exact form you want it and full control over the data to return, not to mention the ability to create an alert using the very same query.  There are however solutions that can be added to your workspace that already have logic and display reports in form of charts or lists. Adding a solution is a matter of seconds, although may of them require and automation account (that's pretty straight forward, don't worry!). You just have to browse the solution gallery from the OMS portal and hit the add button. The first solution I've added to my workspace was Update Management. This solution provides statistics about the update status of your Windows and Linux computers. The first two charts display information about the Windows and Linux computers that have been assessed: The information here is scoped to the computer level as opposed to the next two that show statisti...

Although there are advantages in working with Powershell ISE, there may be times when Powershell is a better approach. Take Exchange for example. You may use the exchange commands by connecting to Exchange and using implicit remoting or use the remoteexchange script. For those of us that are using the Exchange Management Shell, I believe that it would be helpful to be able to update the title of the window in order to reflect the use of that particular prompt. Yesterday I put together a function that allows us to set the title of the window. This function is part of my CPolydorou.Exchange module but since that module has not yet been uploaded to the Powershell Gallery, here's the code: Function Rename-ExchangeShell { <# .SYNOPSIS Set the title on the Exchange Shell window. .DESCRIPTION Set the title on the Exchange Shell window. .PARAMETER Title The new title. .EXAMPLE Rename-ExchangeShell -Title "Mailbox Query"...

I recently visited a client and started doing some health checks on the NetScaler pair they're using. Among other messages I got a message that a user was trying to log in to the appliances using SSH. The message on the Command Center did not provide any information about the source of the attemts, only the username used. Since these attempts were about fine a day and at certain times of the day, I realized that it should be some kind of monitoring tool. But I had to get the IP of the source in order to investigate further... The first few searches did not yell any results since they were all related to the AAA servers that could be set up on the NetScaler. I then decided to search within the BSD system logs and put the NetScaler logs aside. You can find the login attempts, for the NetScaler system, by reviewing the log file located at /var/log/auth.log I found the IP of the source there and it was a monitoring tool!