Remote command output to text file (remote system) - powershell

Question

I know I must be using these commands wrong but I can't seem to find a solution. I believe the issue is with my use of the invoke-command and out-file. I'm trying to check to see if a process is running on multiple remote machines and write their states back to a text file on the host system. Even if it wrote to the remote system I could work with that but I cant seem to get anything.
$MyDomain=’mydomain’
$MyClearTextUsername=’myusername’
$MyClearTextPassword=’mypassword’
$MyUsernameDomain=$MyDomain+’\’+$MyClearTextUsername
$SecurePassword=Convertto-SecureString –String $MyClearTextPassword
-AsPlainText –force
$MyCredentials=New-object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential
$MyUsernameDomain,$SecurePassword
$Servers = ( "server1","server2","server3")
$output = foreach ($Server in $Servers)
{
$Session = New-PSSession -ComputerName $Server -Credential $MyCredentials
Invoke-Command -Session $Session -ScriptBlock
{
Get-Service -Name service | select name, status, PSComputername, Runspaceid
} | Out-File -filepath 'c:\TEMP\check.txt'
}
Write-output $output | Out-File -filepath 'c:\TEMP\check.txt'
edit: I don't believe the last line is needed but I threw it in just to see if I could get anything out.

Answer 1

You are not capturing anything in $output because you are redirecting all of the output from your Invoke-Command to Out-File -filepath 'c:\TEMP\check.txt'. Get-Service doesn't return that much data, especially once's it's been deserialized when it returns from the remote session, so I wouldn't bother with the Select statement. Even if you do want to include the Select statement you are specifying PSComputerName which doesn't get added until the data comes back from the remote system, so you may want to move that Select to outside of the scriptblock and after the Invoke-Command in the pipeline. Plus, since you are outputting with Out-File your local file is being overwritten each time that call is made, so the first server's results are saved, then overwritten by the second server's results, then by the third server's results. After that, since $output has nothing (as all output was redirected to file), you are outputting an empty variable to the same file, effectively erasing the service state of the third server.
But this really all becomes a moot point if the script is run with the credentials that has access to the remote servers. You can specify one or more computer names to the Get-Service cmdlet, so this could become as simple as:
$Results = Get-Service Service -ComputerName 'Server1','Server2','Server3'
$Results | Select name, status, PSComputername, Runspaceid | Set-Content 'C:\TEMP\check.txt'
Just to make sure... you are looking for a service right? Not just a process? Because if it isn't a service you would need to use Get-Process instead of Get-Service.
If you want to output the data to the remote server you could do:
$output = foreach ($Server in $Servers)
{
$Session = New-PSSession -ComputerName $Server -Credential $MyCredentials
Invoke-Command -Session $Session -ScriptBlock
{
Get-Service -Name service | Tee-Object -FilePath C:\Temp\ServiceState.txt
} | select name, status, PSComputername, Runspaceid
}
$output | Out-File -filepath 'c:\TEMP\check.txt'
That should make a file in the C:\Temp folder on each server with the state of the service, as well as pass the information back to the local host, where it is passed to Select and stored in $output. At the end I output $output to file, just as you did.
I guess in the end you could just remove the Out-File call from within your loop, and it would probably do what you want it to.