Monitoring scripts with email alerts in PowerShell - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Monitoring scripts with email alerts

📖 Scenario: You are managing a small server that runs important tasks. You want to check if a specific service is running and get an email alert if it is stopped. This helps you fix problems quickly.

🎯 Goal: Build a PowerShell script that checks the status of the Spooler service and sends an email alert if the service is not running.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable with the service name Spooler

Create a variable with the email recipient address [e-mail]

Check the service status using Get-Service

Send an email alert using Send-MailMessage if the service is stopped

Print a message confirming the alert was sent

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

System administrators use monitoring scripts like this to keep servers running smoothly and get notified quickly if something breaks.

💼 Career

Knowing how to automate monitoring and alerts is a key skill for IT support, system administration, and DevOps roles.

1

Set up service and email variables

Create a variable called serviceName and set it to "Spooler". Create another variable called emailTo and set it to "[e-mail]".

PowerShell

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use = to assign values to variables. Strings go inside double quotes.

2

Get the service status

Use Get-Service with the variable serviceName and store the result in a variable called serviceStatus.

PowerShell

$serviceName = "Spooler"
$emailTo = "[e-mail]"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use Get-Service -Name $serviceName to get the service info.

3

Check if the service is stopped and send email

Write an if statement to check if $serviceStatus.Status equals "Stopped". Inside the if, use Send-MailMessage to send an email to $emailTo with subject "Service Alert" and body "The Spooler service is stopped.". Use -From "[e-mail]" and -SmtpServer "smtp.example.com" in Send-MailMessage.

PowerShell

$serviceName = "Spooler"
$emailTo = "[e-mail]"
$serviceStatus = Get-Service -Name $serviceName
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use -eq to compare strings. The Send-MailMessage command needs all parameters as shown.

4

Print confirmation message

After the Send-MailMessage command inside the if block, add a Write-Output command to print "Alert sent to [e-mail]".

PowerShell

$serviceName = "Spooler"
$emailTo = "[e-mail]"
$serviceStatus = Get-Service -Name $serviceName

if ($serviceStatus.Status -eq "Stopped") {
    Send-MailMessage -To $emailTo -From "[e-mail]" -Subject "Service Alert" -Body "The Spooler service is stopped." -SmtpServer "smtp.example.com"
    # Your code here
}

Need a hint?

Use Write-Output to print text to the console.