Working with PowerShell and modular GUI's?

Question

One of my problems, is that I support clients who often spend a lot of time monitoring if their servers (and services) are functioning properly, and that their network is up and running smoothly.

All of these tasks are easily re mediated through PowerShell, and I had a grand idea to unify all of the tasks and present them in a GUI, with the ability to tail the logs on remote servers at will.

I can execute PowerShell remotely to ascertain all of the facts I need about the servers involved, can poll and retrieve all the relevant points of data, aggregate them in a database, perform trend and abnormality analysis, that's all good.

But I want to aggregate it all into a sort of "management console" to alleviate all of the mundane tasks. Why not?

So I'm looking for some pointers as to where I can look for any frameworks, HTML based or application based, that can leverage the power of PowerShell into a somewhat modular UI interface. From what I've seen and experimented with, C# is abnormally complicated when executing PowerShell cmdlets.

Pardon my ignorance, I'm mainly a scripter. Please point me to the right direction!

I can imagine the exact GUI I want, and can grab and analyze all the data I need to accomplish it... Just not sure of the glue that connects the two.

Answer 1

Take a look on PowerGUI by Dell - it's designed for tasks like this.

Also you can try to do all with bare-hands coding using Windows Forms in PowerShell, like described on this TechNet blog post's series .

Also there is many PowerShell IDE's with visual Form designers - AdminScript is one of oldest.

Answer 2

This is a very general question, I beleive too general for StackOverflow. Here are my first thoughts as is :

1) Collecting datas on server is avery old story, begining with SNMP and continuing with WMI and more generaly "Windows Management Framework" on Windows. So client UI, you can adapt to your clients exists on the market. Have a look to Centreon , or Paessler .

2) As far as PowerShell is involved have a look to the Quest (now DELL) PowerGUI console (not the script editor)

3) If really you want it (not a good idea for me) you can write a PowerShell UI application, have a look to Sapien's PowerShell Studio . I give some clues about programming PowerShell UIs here .