PowerShell Queries for Failed Services on Remote Machines

Monitoring critical services is an everyday task for many system administrators, but the large number of services running on systems makes manual inspection tedious. PowerShell's Get-Service cmdlet doesn't yet allow you to examine services remotely, but you can see remote service information with the Get-WmiObject cmdlet. I've written a simple script to automate examining services for startup problems across an entire network. I'll show you how to use the Get-StoppedAutomaticService script, then discuss how it works and why PowerShell's Get-Service cmdlet isn't helpful for this job.

Using Get-StoppedAutomaticService
Listing 1 shows the Get-StoppedAutomaticService script, which you can download by clicking the Download the Code Here button at the top of the page. Here's the abstract form of the command-line usage for the script:

Get-StoppedAutomaticService 
  [[-ComputerName]  ] 
  [[-Exclude]  ]
  [-Credential  ]
  [-Synopsis]

You can get this command-line usage yourself by running the script with the Synopsis parameter as follows: . . .