Inventory Windows Installations with Monitis and PowerShell

In the previous articles, we talked about how you can use WMI, PowerShell, and custom monitors to monitor a wealth of information with Monitis.  Today, we’ll revisit the subject, and show how you can monitor windows skus and serial numbers with the same general technique.

Remember, to easily monitor anything with Monitis and PowerShell, you need to download our PowerShell module.    We’ll start with a complete script, and break it up line by line:
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Monitoring Connections to Shared Folders with Monitis and Custom Monitors

In the last couple of articles, we’ve talked about how to create and update custom monitors that use WMI to push information into Monitis.  So far, we’ve only used WMI to get the information, and then used that to update custom monitors in monitis.  Today, we’re going to use a built in capability of PowerShell and WMI to make custom monitors that update whenever something happens on the system.

WMI stands for Windows Management Instrumentation, and it is a huge store of information that’s been built into the operating system since Windows 2000.  So far we’ve been using one feature of WMI, getting information from classes.  It’s also possible to use WMI to find out when things happen on the operating system.
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Monitoring Logons with Monitis

The last couple of articles have introduced you to some of the fun things you can monitor with WMI and Monitis.  Today, we’ll show you how to use the monitis custom monitor infrastructure to track what users are registered on a system.

The PowerShell command to get this inform from WMI is very simple:

Get-WmiObject win32_LoggedOnUser

This returns back what WMI class an association class.  This class tells you the relationships between two things: the loggedon session, and the user that logged on.  You have to be running as admin to accurately see the results of this class.
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Hardware Inventory with Monitis Custom Monitors

In the last article, we introduced custom monitors, and explained the benefits of agentless monitoring, and we showed how you can use some of the built in PowerShell features to save time and typing when creating custom monitors.

Today, we’ll start on the first of several practical end-to-end scenarios.  We’re going to create a custom hardware inventory in Monitis with PowerShell, and update it in the same script.
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