IT administrators and scripting
With scripting you can easily automate simple and repeatable tasks. For IT management (monitoring) scripts are frequently used. This creates a powerful platform for automating tasks. Scripts are mainly used because they simplify the management of business processes and improve IT performance. This means scripts are used everywhere in a typical corporate IT environment.
Dangers of scripting
- Error sensitivity: by modifying scripts yourself, errors may occur in the code. The most eye-catching errors are likely to be discovered quickly the first time the script has run, but less obvious errors can remain inactive for weeks, months or years and appear devastated unexpectedly.
- Lack of support: When a (modified) script fails, there is no hotline to call, no support agreement and only you are responsible. If an incorrectly coded script unintentionally deletes data, crashes systems or otherwise damages a production environment, the costs and responsibility are for yourself.
- Loss of important knowledge: Custom scripts are usually created and managed by a single administrator. If that individual changes roles or worse, leaves the company completely, the script will not be managed until it breaks or needs to be revised. In the best case this is time consuming. However, most of the time scripts are extremely complicated and not well documented, the encoding of the code can take a long time, while the services remain low and manual processes have to be performed to maintain the affected operations.
- Changes in the environment: Administrators write scripts to work on the environment that exists at the time of their development. However, the reality is that IT environments are constantly changing, with files and applications often being moved, configuration settings being periodically changed and software components being constantly patched and updated.
- Growing number of scripts: A frequent use of scripts results in a complex structure that can seriously cause business problems. This creates a chaos of active scripts, inactive scripts, relevant, non-relevant and forgotten scripts and even scripts that refer to scripts. This makes the IT environment uncontrollable and makes it difficult to quickly identify and resolve the cause of critical problems.
for /f “tokens=*” %%i in (‘C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\appcmd list sites /text:name /state:started’) do (
IF [“%%i”] == [“%_sitename%”] (
echo Site not running: %_sitename%
Benefits of scripting
Monitoring tool and scripting
TSMS and scripting
- deadlocks in databases
- monitoring of manufactured specific hardware
- app pools in IIS serverWith scripts these can be easily monitored. Because scripts give feedback in a standardized way, the “Third Party Connector” module has been built in TSMS. With this you can add scripts / plugins to TSMS and depending on the feedback you will be alerted or informed that the danger has passed.