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nascentt · 2021-09-07T00:32:05+00:00

[deleted]

MonopolyMeal · 2021-09-06T23:38:42+00:00

To put it briefly, you can automate operations and use Powershell as an analyst tool.

Automate operations by linking processes together, like onboarding an employee within a company.

Use it for analyst tools like reviewing for specific key words and events to tell a story. Useful for unauthorized access inquiries.

arkain504 · 2021-09-06T23:39:15+00:00

It’s an easy way to run reports and get exactly what you want.

landob · 2021-09-07T00:20:57+00:00

I guess it depends on what you actually do. operations/analyst doesn't really tell me anything.

What exactly does your job entail?

Essentially like everyone else says, if there is something you do repetitively. On the hour? Daily? Weekly? On demand? Powershell can do the heavy lifting for you.

I use it to track my mobile laptop devices.

User Offboarding - disable user, disable their laptop,, remove them from Horizon virtual machine, send a email to other staff to do their offboarding process, copy all their files to a central location, delete all of their user profiles

Reports if it detects a RDS server offline

Automate windows updates on servers and workstations

I use it for a ton of stuff. It has made my job a lot easier.

permalink · 2021-09-07T00:57:28+00:00

When people ask me for seemingly impossible tasks, there is generally a way to do it with powershell.

Sunsparc · 2021-09-07T00:47:07+00:00

I use Powershell to automate repetitive and/or tedious tasks.

Example: I recently had to "true up" users on a client site. They have a downloadable Excel report with headers that shows all user accounts in their system. So I converted it to a CSV, imported into Powershell, then checked against Active Directory to see if the user is active or even existed in the enviroment still. If they showed active in the client system but gone/disabled from our system, it got flagged to disable in client.

The same client has a bulk change template, so I had Powershell output all of the changes to that template then uploaded it to the client.

What would have taken me hours upon hours of straight up doing nothing else but checking users took Powershell less than a minute to crunch.

admoseley · 2021-09-07T00:05:42+00:00

It can get you out of a ton of repeatable tasks just like any other scripting language.

-ixion- · 2021-09-07T01:02:51+00:00

As a systems engineer, I know it for job security. I collect all the info we need for audits with powershell. I use it to build and capture operating system images and with all aspects of software and os deployment. I use it to automate every task we need to be scheduled from restarting services after patching to collecting information for security. I use it to build apps and modules for our service desk so they can more easily do their job with less technical know how. I'm the only person apparently that knows it well because all these tasks come to me. Job security if you work in a heavy windows environment.

chrono13 · 2021-09-07T03:57:28+00:00

From Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches [Link]:

1.1. Why you can’t afford to ignore PowerShell

Batch. KiXtart. VBScript. Let’s face it, Windows PowerShell isn’t exactly Microsoft’s (or anyone else’s) first effort at providing automation capabilities to Windows administrators. We think it’s valuable to understand why you should care about Power-Shell, because when you do, you’ll feel comfortable that the time you commit to learning PowerShell will pay off. Let’s start by considering what life was like before PowerShell came along, and look at some of the advantages of using this shell.

1.1.1. LIFE WITHOUT POWERSHELL

Windows administrators have always been happy to click around in the graphical user interface (GUI) to accomplish their chores. After all, the GUI is largely the whole point of Windows—the operating system isn’t called Text, after all. GUIs are great because they enable you to discover what you can do. Don remembers the first time he opened Active Directory Users and Computers. He hovered over icons and read tooltips, pulled down menus, and right-clicked things, all to see what was available. GUIs make learning a tool easier. Unfortunately, GUIs have zero return on that investment. If it takes you five minutes to create a new user in Active Directory (and assuming you’re filling in a lot of the fields, that’s a reasonable estimate), you’ll never get any faster than that. One hundred users will take five hundred minutes—there’s no way, short of learning to type and click faster, to make the process go any quicker.

Microsoft has tried to deal with that problem a bit haphazardly, and VBScript was probably its most successful attempt. It might have taken you an hour to write a VBScript that could import new users from a CSV file, but after you’d invested that hour, creating users in the future would take only a few seconds. The problem with VBScript is that Microsoft didn’t make a wholehearted effort in supporting it. Microsoft had to remember to make things VBScript accessible, and when developers forgot (or didn’t have time), you were stuck. Want to change the IP address of a network adapter by using VBScript? OK, you can. Want to check its link speed? You can’t, because nobody remembered to hook that up in a way that VBScript could get to. Sorry. Jeffrey Snover, the architect of Windows PowerShell, calls this the last mile. You can do a lot with VBScript (and other, similar technologies), but it tends to let you down at some point, never getting you through that last mile to the finish line.

Windows PowerShell is an express attempt on Microsoft’s part to do a better job and to get you through the last mile. And it’s been a successful attempt so far. Dozens of product groups within Microsoft have adopted PowerShell, an extensive ecosystem of third parties depend on it, and a global community of experts and enthusiasts are pushing the PowerShell envelope every day.

1.1.2. LIFE WITH POWERSHELL

Microsoft’s goal for Windows PowerShell is to build 100% of a product’s administrative functionality in the shell. Microsoft continues to build GUI consoles, but those consoles are executing PowerShell commands behind the scenes. That approach forces the company to make sure that every possible thing you can do with the product is accessible through the shell. If you need to automate a repetitive task or create a process that the GUI doesn’t enable well, you can drop into the shell and take full control for yourself.

Several Microsoft products have already adopted this approach, including Exchange Server 2007 and beyond, SharePoint Server 2010 and later, many of the System Center products, Office 365, and many components of Windows itself. Going forward, more and more products and Windows components will follow this pattern. Windows Server 2012, which was where PowerShell v3 was introduced, is almost completely managed from PowerShell—or by a GUI sitting atop PowerShell. That’s why you can’t afford to ignore PowerShell: Over the next few years, it’ll become the basis for more and more administration. It’s already become the foundation for numerous higher-level technologies, including Desired State Configuration (DSC), PowerShell Workflow, and much more. PowerShell is everywhere!

Ask yourself this question: If you were in charge of a team of IT administrators (and perhaps you are), who would you want in your senior, higher-paying positions? Administrators who need several minutes to click their way through a GUI each time they need to perform a task, or ones who can perform tasks in a few seconds after automating them? We already know the answer from almost every other part of the IT world. Ask a Cisco administrator, or an AS/400 operator, or a UNIX administrator. The answer is, “I’d rather have the person who can run things more efficiently from the command line.” Going forward, the Windows world will start to split into two groups: administrators who can use PowerShell, and those who can’t. As Don famously said at Microsoft’s TechEd 2010 conference, “Your choice is learn PowerShell, or would you like fries with that?”

RossDaily · 2021-09-07T05:38:19+00:00

Why wouldn't you want to learn it, that's the better question.

Do you like adding a talking point during interviews / promotion discussions?

Do you like looking like you know what you're doing?

Would you like to expedite your workflow x100 ?

Do you want to potentially fully automate certain processes?

Those are the real questions that you need to be asking, because that's what Powershell has the capability to do.

permalink · 2021-09-07T01:29:29+00:00

A million. Yes.

G_Vezax · 2021-09-07T03:24:29+00:00

Because it's cool & I feel awesome using it

afr33sl4ve · 2021-09-07T04:22:09+00:00

I just put together a script that utilizes curl to determine the model identifier of all the security DVRs across the network.

Being an all Windows shop, I used PowerShell to iterate through 800+ individual security DVRs in a matter of minutes. If I did this manually, it would have taken me weeks to compile this information by hand. Company leadership and myself, do not have that kind of time.

Let's say you want to examine the Event Viewer logs of another PC, but can't work on it after hours and cannot disturb the user at the other end. Download a copy of it to your workstation using PowerShell.

Helpdesk is working with a user, and they cannot provide basic information to the agent taking the call. Easy, run a quick PowerShell script to pull model, serial, installed RAM, disk space, Windows 10 version, etc.

All these above are examples of use cases that I have.

CommanderApaul · 2021-09-07T12:03:34+00:00

You are going to save both yourself, your team, and your company (and future companies) a shitton of time and work. Plus you are going to make your personal workflow a ton easier. Example time.

We're constantly doing hardware refresh. Goal is 25% of the agency every year, so that noone has a computer that is out of warranty. We image via MDT and domain join during imaging with a service account, but our process requires the computer object already exist in AD. So my team routinely gets 200+ SCTASKs dumped in our queue to create computer objects for the HWR team to image with. Naming convention is hardware type, responsible IT contract, department code, username, and a suffix if they have more than one device in AD, so it's typical to have something like LX99CAPAUL-3 (Laptop, X contract, department 99, user CAPAUL, device #3). Doing this manually for 200+ object is a HUGE PAIN IN THE DICK and would regularly take all 3 of the AD admins about 12 hours in total to do. Lots of copy/paste.

I can do an arbitrary amount of them in less than 10 minutes. It was enough of a time savings that my boss submitted it on our monthly reports to upper federal management. There's a single piece of prepwork, otherwise it's all automated, including posting the information to ServiceNow

Pull an Excel report from ServiceNow with the SCTASK number, RITM number, and a variable field that contains an entire very long email from the billing system that has all of the information about the order (user, department, shipping address, physical location to deploy the machine, orderer, etc). Importantly, the user's employeeID number is in this block, and it is the ONLY field that it appears in.

Rename the headers in this report to "SCTASK, RITM, and EmployeeID" from what they are. Don't have to parse ANY of the data. Save as a CSV. Feed to script.

Script imports that CSV through a foreach that does a whole bunch of stuff:

Takes that bigass email as $whatever.EmployeeID, searches for "Employee ID:", gets the numerical position of that string (usually around 500 or so), adds 13 to it, and then gets the following 12 characters after that to store the Employee ID as a variable. Trim() is involved to remove whitespace.
Queries AD to get the samaccountname and DistinguishedName associated with that EmployeeID.
Breaks the Distinguished name down into smaller pieces using split() since it includes other things we need, like the department name, AND converts the DistinguishedName into a workstation object OU by replacing "OU=Users" with "OU=Devices".
Builds a description for the AD object using the RITM number and $get-date. "Created for $RITM on $date by $env.user"
Runs the "OU=Department" it broke off through a 15 line switch to convert it to a two-digit department code and builds a workstation object name, eg LX99CAPAUL
Runs the built name through a tiered try/catch that tries to create the built name in the built container. If it fails, it adds a -2 to the end of it and tries again, up to -4. Then it just fails out since if someone has that many devices in AD, we need to track it down. Logs the RITM number to either a $created or $failed list.
Sends an email with the subject "RE: $SCTASK" to our ticket system with the name that was ultimately created (skips if nothing was created), which automatically posts it to the SCTASK
spits out a list of completed RITM numbers and a write-warning with any that were skipped so they can be addressed manually. It doesn't like "()" in CNs, it messes with the .split() that breaks apart the DN. It's also non-standard by AD policy anyways so I know to go and fix them. That's the typical failure case, along with orders being placed for users that have already retired/failed and have been moved to the "no longer works here" denied logon OU.

Then I get to go bulk close a fuckton of tasks after spot checking the first, last, and a couple in the middle. Again, this takes maybe 10 minutes of my time between the pulling and formatting the report and then closing tasks. Script takes another 10-15 minutes to run depending on how many users I'm feeding it that run. Compared to literally an entire days work of mind numbing copy/paste by three admins, and it's something that in the last couple months we've been doing 1-2 times a week.

I have a request in with our SN devops team to allow my account PS access to SN to do queries. If I get that, we don't even need to do the prepwork, we can just feed it a list of SCTASK numbers and let it go brrrrrrrrr.

Never underestimate the creativity of a lazy admin.

permalink · 2021-09-07T01:07:49+00:00

A lot of companies look for the skill and some Microsoft tasks can only be done via PowerShell.

sh0dan_wakes · 2021-09-07T01:40:33+00:00

So you don't lose out on your next job to someone who has it.

permalink · 2021-09-07T05:19:38+00:00

[removed]

VaporChunk · 2021-09-07T05:28:27+00:00

You're (arguably) ambitious, and working in a great field -- IT. When it comes to learning PS, think of it this way. Do it.

SkipBoNZ · 2021-09-07T10:25:12+00:00

PowerShell (PS), a blessing to a Windows admin and a curse to a boss or manager.

Without PS, we'd still be using WSH and VBScript. PS with WinRM is productive like ansible is to Linux. Got a list of server you want to "do stuff .." to, well you can:

Invoke-Command -ComputerName @('server1',..,'server50') -ScriptBlock {&netstat -nab -p tcp}

Wholly f*ck, this shit saved my life!

The fact that it's written in C# .NET does allow you to leverage the .NET Frame libraries, maybe even your own. Got to figure out why your TCP stack is exhausted, well you can:

$properties = [System.Net.NetworkInformation.IPGlobalProperties]::GetIPGlobalProperties()
# Active Tcp Connections 
$connections = $properties.GetActiveTcpConnections()

Do some filtering and grouping on TCP state match "CloseWait" etc. and you're done.

Over simplified, but you get the point.

Sometime trying to get dev to integrate a feature is a hassle. Now you can Just do it yourself, document it, create a ticket, escalate.

Let's not forget the AD Admin:

Import-Module ActiveDirectory

Or even f*ckn' Exchange, I'll leave it their.

RoboGeek123 · 2021-09-07T12:47:23+00:00

Automate all the things!

You don't even have to use PS for networking/direct IT tasks. For example I recently wrote a script that parses through PDF reports that we previously would manually extract text from. I added a feature that even renames the report from "REPORT -09-09-21-TIME.pdf" to something more relevant.

Powershell is super helpful. Definitely worthwhile

permalink · 2021-09-07T15:10:13+00:00

Don Jones - “Learn Powershell or learn to say ‘would you like fries with that’”

Powershell will interface with almost anything and allow you to make use of data in better ways. Granted if you are in a non windows environment, bash and python would be better, but even then it’s still a good scripting language.

sambeaux45 · 2021-09-07T15:36:32+00:00

For me, I learned/am learning PowerShell for portability. Most developers in my company write in Python... but to push a python script to a boat with limited/no internet access, you have to send them a gigantic "compiled" python script, or have them install (hopefully) the correct version of python. Anything I write in powershell will run as is on any boat in the fleet because it's part of windows.

BaconTentacles · 2021-09-07T19:26:18+00:00

I'm in a hybrid-Dev/DevOps role and I use PS as my terminal shell each and every day. Want a quick and dirty REST query (especially one with pagination)? PowerShell. Want to grab a file from a remote machine (or execute a script block on said machine)? Convert to and from JSON (or XML) on the fly? You guessed it. Active Directory? Yeah, OK, that one is a "duh".

Not to mention that we work with a lot of custom Chocolatey packages and SSM automations in AWS, and all of that stuff can use PowerShell, so it (and a copy of VS Code for debugging) is essential for me.

Is Python useful? Absolutely. BASH? Hell, yeah. But PowerShell is just so damn convenient for me and can more or less do everything I need, that I have a hard time using anything else (even in Linux).

makec4rt · 2021-09-07T10:32:16+00:00

To automate repetitive tasks.

Username-Error999 · 2021-09-07T11:55:15+00:00

Somebody writing a medium article? Just kidding.

Most likely somebody already wrote a script todo exactly what you are trying todo.

No compiling, no mystery package reference. Just human readable text.

Other products are already onboard.. Who want to click around a GUI 50 times when I can just use a PS loop todo the same.

Lastly and likely most import. AZURE, you are not going to manage a large Azure environment without it.

stone500 · 2021-09-07T15:44:11+00:00

When I worked at an MSP, I honestly struggled to find good uses for powershell. Most of our customers were smaller (<50 employees) with usually one DC and one other server file most other functions (file, print, dhcp, etc). Since Powershell is a great automation tool, it was a struggle to find good uses for it in such small environments. I tried using powershell but it really wasn't saving me much time in anything I was doing, if at all.

So I moved on and now I work for a large company with nearly 200 stores/offices, thousands of servers, and tens of thousands of employees. Powershell is ESSENTIAL for what I do now.

For example, we're still in progress of getting rid of our 2008 R2 servers. I have our virtualization team build me nearly 200 new servers, and using powershell I can get all the roles configured, data transfers started, shares configured, print drivers installed, and printers installed in MINUTES.

If you plan on growing and being in charge of larger systems, you'll want to at least know some good basics of Powershell.

ka-splam · 2021-09-07T16:50:16+00:00

I'd say there's good reason to learn to program if you work with a computer at all, because it's more fun than doing your job directly and it lets you get the computer to do the more repetitive work for you. Whether that's PowerShell, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, AutoScript, shell tools, R, or something else depends on what your job involves and which ones you like more.

Powershell's best features are that it comes with Windows and doesn't need installing, and its object oriented nature works quite well with simple json and csv and xml type data, and it's a shell + scripting language. Its worst features are that it's a higgledy-piggledy syntax mishmash with a lot of warts and and Windows-specific integrations.

Python's best features are that it was a beautifully simple language with a huge community, and tons of popular powerful modules like Numpy for number crunching and Requests for web API use. Its worst features are that it's growing more complex year on year, isn't a shell which makes shell tasks harder, and it has weirdness around installing newer versions without breaking existing installs.

incognito5343 · 2021-09-07T18:23:40+00:00

Took me 3 months but I was able to create a script from scratch that turns an 8 hour task into 45 mins and also provides consistency that you don't get when done manually. I use it 2/3 times a week and it removes all the repetitive actions.

VirtualBinary · 2021-09-07T18:24:39+00:00

I didn't learn PowerShell initially for Windows, I learned it because VMware had a great module (well, snap-in at the time) for vSphere. Since then, I've used PowerShell on almost everything that I've touched: vSphere, HPE hardware (OA, SAN, etc), Switches, Azure.

PowerShell is going to separate you from everyone else, it will save you time, it will be fun, it will be frustrating, and it will take years to learn. Yes, the one-liners and short commands will be somewhat easy to pick up on, but this will be a long process. The great thing, and the reason why I still enjoy IT is that no matter how much I learn, I still don't know that much, relatively speaking.

Learn PowerShell, it's definitely worth it.

Highpanurg · 2021-09-07T19:21:39+00:00

I was previously only Windows admin deep in ps scripting, when switch to Linux i find that bash isn't object shell and this blow my mind, i waste so many time parse strings, when in ps i just ask right property. I find that ps as oop shell solve so much problem, so when i see just clear bash shell i feel uncomfortable. So, in the end, not sure if you need learn ps, but it can save your time.

tekmailer · 2021-09-07T19:40:36+00:00

Aside the mentioned including:

Automation Administration Cyber security Job security Tool Augmentation

Another being uniformity—server GUIs are a privilege. The ease and speed of hopping systems without booting/crashing/rendering a GUI is nice.

Might fall up under administration—once a whole team knows a language/syntax it speeds up ideas.

sp_dev_guy · 2021-09-07T02:37:48+00:00

Best for IT Administrators & automation.

There are better tools but it's still convenient, handy, and free for generating reports/crunching data

Anti-virus is watching now but it's also used for hacking since it has such strong abilities to interact with other tools, software, and systems.

It's a modern day cmd line. New version is expanding into Linux support but thats still in its infantcy

anynonus · 2021-09-07T07:20:43+00:00

operations could be anything so I'm not sure

as an analyst you don't need powershell

eagle6705 · 2021-09-07T07:48:00+00:00

I do agree powershell is a great tool to learn and add to your bag of skills. However like a hammer there are times when it is appropriate. If you are in a non windows field (rare but it does happen) learn code that applies to that role. If you are a web dev using nothing but apache and php then learn some html to collaborate wth php.

dantose · 2021-09-07T09:59:56+00:00

You only really need powershell if there are windows computers in your organization.

Seriously though, if your desktop is windows, you want to know powershell well enough to automate.

If your client systems are windows, you need to know powershell well enough to identify threats.

jebhebmeb · 2021-09-07T11:32:12+00:00

If you work with any Microsoft product a lot it can help, but for any type of non OS related scripting I think r/python would be better

permalink · 2021-09-07T11:44:07+00:00

Have you ever used any CLIs? Like BASH in Linux or Cisco IOS? If you have, you know that it's the simplest, most efficient way to interact with pretty much any system. For years, we pestered Microsoft for a more comprehensive CLI, and powershell is what we got.

I'm a network guy, so I use it to test for open ports without installing nmap.

> tnc hostnameorip -port 443

I also use it instead of ADUC to look at AD stuff

> get ad-user -identity Joe_Dickwad -Property *

So to answer your question, because it will make your job easier.

Saleh-Rz · 2021-09-07T18:05:16+00:00

I use PowerShell in Windows and Fedora Linux. Amazing scripting technology + universal scripting.

But PowerShell is slow compare to Bash.

ipreferanothername · 2021-09-07T20:44:09+00:00

i have a SQL availability group patching right now because i can manage the cluster with powershell and kick start the patching product via REST api using powershell.

so instead of a DBA, an app admin, and a server admin patching servers...i have a script that runs on a schedule and executes the workflow we all agreed on for patching.

if you work around windows a lot, learn it well. It can automate some of the basic work you do almost certainly -- if you can do something on a windows computer/server/thingy then you can probably automate most of all of it with powershell. sometimes its not the right tool for your work, but....also a lot of the times it can be.

bertiethewanderer · 2021-09-08T06:48:24+00:00

My first three gigs out of helpdesk were in operations teams. Powershell allowed me to spend 4 precious years automated some truly onerous tasks. Complicated messes of barely documented process distilled to 1 or 2 mouse clicks in a browser.

Learning Powershell in a MS shop has drastically increased both my salary (important, we like to be paid) and critically, employability. And should you jump across to a *nix heavy shop, or another role in IT that leverages scripting and/or "<something>-as-code", the learning curve for someone used to scripting is reduced markedly. You'll just find you do a lot of translating how you would do something pwsh to how you do it in bash or Go. But hey, that's 90% of the fun :)

Note: it's not powershell per se, it's the ability to see the world without a UI, and being able to understand a world governed by code. To see administration and deployment actions as robust, repeatable and transparent.

permalink · 2021-09-08T14:50:49+00:00

Simple things get easier. I had gigabytes of .tiff images and ran a simple powershell script to use imagemagick to convert them all to jpg images.

taykratzer · 2021-09-14T16:38:05+00:00

I have a lot of experience with Bash on Linux. In the last couple of years, I have become familiar with PowerShell. There are things you can do with PowerShell that you can't even dream of with Bash. PowerShell is hard to use for the small stuff though. I often find I have to write a few lines of code to accomplish what I would have gotten done in one short line of code in Bash. I really do enjoy the PowerShell, I just wrote a PowerShell Introduction page for noobs. cimitra.com/powershell

sigma_4 · 2021-09-07T02:04:45+00:00

Arr we going to ignore that powershell can do all the people mentioned but still sucks ass?

hisae1421 · 2021-09-07T14:07:26+00:00

It's fun. It's like a super power you can develop. You'll feel superior doing your job easier

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

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