Get version of Installed Software on remote machine - powershell

Question

I am trying a write an application to fetch the version of the application installed on remote machines. There is a need to query many remote servers and get the version of the application and show it on the dashboard.
Powershell WMI takes too long to get the information. I am looking for something lot faster.
The app will read remote server information like IP, Username, and password from a config file and fetch the data.
Any help is really appreciated.

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to take a closer look at Powershell Sessions.
There are at least two ways to approach in from there, one is using Invoke-Command in combination with the -ComputerName attribute, possibly along with -Authentication or -Credential. -ScriptBlock contains the code you want to run.
Invoke-Command -ComputerName "computername.domain.local" -ScriptBlock { ... }
I assume from "the application" that your concern is one application, and not every application. Then you should be able to tell the version by running Get-Item on the executable, then look at either VersionInfo.ProductVersion or VersionInfo.FileVersion, whichever is more relevant to your case.
To access one of them, you could use something like:
$version = (Get-Item "path-to-executable\executable.exe').VersionInfo.ProductVersion
To find out which attributes are relevant to your executable, you can run
Get-Item "executable.exe" | Select -ExpandProperty VersionInfo | Format-List *
Combining these techniques, you could try something like this.
# this is a dummy array for example purposes
$computers = #(#{'ip' = '127.0.0.1'; 'username' = 'admin'; 'password' = 'password'})
foreach($computer in $computers)
{
# creating a PSCredential object from plain text passwords is not a good practice, but I'm assuming here that's what you've got to work with
$credentials = [System.Management.Automation.PSCredential]::new($computer.username, (ConvertTo-SecureString -String $computer.password -AsPlainText -Force))
# fetch versioninfo info from remote computer
$versioninfo = Invoke-Command -ComputerName $computer.ip -Credential $credentials -ScriptBlock { Get-Item "executable.exe" | Select -ExpandProperty VersionInfo
if ($versioninfo.ProductVersion -ne '3.1.2414.0')
{
# do something if product version isn't 3.1.2414.0
}
if ($versioninfo.ProductVersionRaw.Major -lt 5)
{
# do something if product version major part is less than 5 (true for 1.5.5.5 but false for 5.1.1.1)
}
}
If you want to run several commands on the client computers, use New-PSSession and pass the session along to every call to Invoke-Command, otherwise you'd lose time and resources opening a new session every time.
Here's an example on how that could be achieved:
$session = New-PSSession -ComputerName $computer.ip -Credential $credentials
$versioninfo = Invoke-Command -Session $session -ScriptBlock { # do something }
if ($versioninfo.ProductVersion -lt 1)
{
Invoke-Command -Session $session -ScriptBlock { # do something else }
}
Remove-PSSession -Session $session
You might also want to check out the using: scope modifier if you find a need to pass variables along to the remote computer, which would make $localvariable visible at the remote computer with $using:localvariable (readonly)
If time is still a concern after this (especially with tcp timeouts on offline hosts), then threading is the next topic you'd want to look into.
As far as I know, my code is compatible with Powershell v3.1, but I recommend using no less than v5, especially on the machine running the script.
This should be enough information to send you on your way. Good luck. :)