Following a bit of a theme here. I did some exploring on scenarios related to using the GPO Reporting Pak PowerShell cmdlets to automate some GP troubleshooting.
This video talks about searching through the output of your report inside the PowerShell pipeline. This allows you to let your imagination go and come up with some very interesting ways to solve GP related configuration issues quickly. Check out the video and let me know what you think!
This example goes through some common PowerShell activities that you will use anywhere PowerShell is at play. The context is around SDM Software’s GPO Reporting Pak but the skills are able to be generalized across other management activities.
That’s very cool and helpful stuff, Kevin!
Thanks for sharing.
My only doubt is about the “time it takes” in a large environment to run this Report – which you mention as well.
To my opinion, if I only have a small environment with few GPO’s, I don’t even need the ReportingPak 😉
The benefit of these great tools is mainly for large domains where it is hard to handle the mass of GPO’s. But when there are hundreds of GPO’s – then such a report can take hours…
Can you maybe provide some hints on how to deal with this?
Sorry for late reply Patrick. You are right of course. The time it takes to run a report like this is going to be contingent on the size or organization and numbers of GPOs, and complexity of those GPOs or course. One of the things about automation I love and working in PowerShell is sometimes ‘fast’ is not my goal. So imagine I have a project where I need to find certain settings on a schedule, monthly, quarterly, daily etc. It doesn’t really matter. With PowerShell I can write the script, and execute it as a job, get a notification when the job is complete and go reap the rewards. It is not necessarily about working at an interactive console, it is more of creating repeatable processes. If I have 1000 GPOs with tens of thousands of settings well, I don’t want to sit and watch that for sure. But I may want to have a job execute every Wednesday night, and come in Thursday morning to fresh reports showing me what I have seen.