{"id":2088,"date":"2015-09-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.simple-talk.com\/uncategorized\/build-your-own-resource-monitor-in-a-jiffy\/"},"modified":"2016-07-28T10:48:02","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T10:48:02","slug":"build-your-own-resource-monitor-in-a-jiffy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/sysadmin\/powershell\/build-your-own-resource-monitor-in-a-jiffy\/","title":{"rendered":"Build Your Own Resource Monitor in a Jiffy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Often times, as developers, we want to exercise some code that has side effects on external resources-be it database transactions, file creation, file content updates, event log records, process state, memory use, and so on. We want to see what effect our code is having by keeping track of those external resources in real-time, or close to it. There are a variety of dedicated tools for some of these types of things. Some give you an instant in time: tools like Windows’ Event Viewer snapshots your event log, and SQL Server Management Studio lets you snapshot any table (or group of tables with a join). You can refresh that snapshot as you wish, in order to monitor those resources. Others provide a continuous monitor: SQL Profiler or SysInternals’ Process Explorer \/ Process Monitor are noteworthy examples. These tools are of a type that continually refreshes the snapshot, effectively giving you near-real-time feedback.<\/p>\n

And if there happens to be a dedicated monitoring program of that type for what you need to track, that’s great, but that isn’t always the case. Often you want to track something unique to your code that doesn’t expose a WMI performance counter, so you need a custom monitor. <\/p>\n

We’ve all probably used PowerShell’s Get-Process<\/code> cmdlet to get repeated information about a process that you’re tracking, but what about something a bit easier and slicker. I felt sure that someone in the PowerShell community would have come up with a simple solution. Then I discovered an old PowerShell routine by Marc van Orsouw,  ‘thePowerShellGuy’, a.k.a MoW;  a Swiss Cloud consultant and a former PowerShell MVP best known for his WMI Explorer script.  This script was a small and lightweight PowerShell utility designed to do display dynamically changing information in a grid from a repeating PowerShell script block.<\/p>\n

All you needed to do was:<\/p>\n