How to save realtime output to txt file in Powershell ? Monitoring Script

Question

I need help saving logs directly to a txt file. I made a simple monitoring script of our servers and computers. Basically I just need to know whether it is online or offline but i need the logs to be save directly whatever the output is.

While ($true) {
    $ServerName = Get-Content "E:\ServerList.txt"
    foreach ($Server in $ServerName) {
        if (test-Connection -ComputerName $Server -Count 3 -quiet ) {
            Write-Host "$Server is Online " -ForegroundColor Green ;(Get-Date).toString("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss")
        } else {
            Write-Host "$Server - is Offline " -ForegroundColor Red ;(Get-Date).toString("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss")
        }
    }

How can I improve it?

Answer 1

You can use Out-File cmdlet with -Append switch to save data in .txt file for logging.

In this example you will have both, info output to console and to file too:

$LogFile = 'C:\log.txt'
While ($true) {
    $ServerName = Get-Content "E:\ServerList.txt"
    foreach ($Server in $ServerName) {
        if (test-Connection -ComputerName $Server -Count 3 -quiet ) {
            Write-Host "$Server is Online " -ForegroundColor Green ;(Get-Date).toString("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss")
            "{0}`t{1} is Online " -f (Get-Date).toString("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss"),$Server | Out-File $LogFile -Append -Force
        } else {
            Write-Host "$Server - is Offline " -ForegroundColor Red ;(Get-Date).toString("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss")
            "{0}`t{1} is Offline " -f (Get-Date).toString("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss"),$Server | Out-File $LogFile -Append -Force
        }
    }
}