Run Powershell scripts in Console Tasks

I am working on one of the projects and as a part of it I needed to create some console tasks that would run a Powershell script to do the stuff I want. I knew that it was no problem for a script a line of two long, but any more than that and it is a real pain to pass it as the parameter in the console task. The other way I was aware of is you can point the path to your script in the parameters if you have it locally saved on your management servers (each and every one of them, at the exact same path). This didn’t really serve my purpose as I wanted to embed in a re-usable XML so I decided to do something on my own.

After a bit of researching the Internet and a lot of trial-and-error, I finally got it working. The key points to remember here are:

1. CDATA to parse it through xml

2. -command “cmd1;cmd2” to pass the block as a single input

3. Using “;” to break the cmdlets

4. Use the escape character “\” before every double quote (“) to skip the character otherwise the compiler misunderstands it for -command syntax and throws errors.

Here’s an example of the XML, with a simple Powershell code that creates an event in the custom event source:

 

<ManagementPackFragment SchemaVersion="2.0" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
	<Categories>
		<Category ID ="Cat.CustomTasks.CreateEvent"  Target ="CustomTasks.CreateEvent" Value ="System!System.Internal.ManagementPack.ConsoleTasks.MonitoringObject"/>
	</Categories>
	<Presentation>

		<ConsoleTasks>

			<ConsoleTask ID="CustomTasks.CreateEvent" Accessibility="Internal" Enabled="true" Target="Windows!Microsoft.Windows.Computer" RequireOutput="true">
				<Assembly>CustomTasks.CTCreateEventAssembly</Assembly>
				<Handler>ShellHandler</Handler>

				<Parameters>
					<Argument Name ="WorkingDirectory"/>
					<Argument Name ="Application">%windir%\system32\windowsPowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe</Argument>
					<Argument>
						<![CDATA[ -command 
						"
#Create a custom source;
New-EventLog -Source 'Task Source Name' -LogName 'Operations Manager';
#Write the event;
Write-EventLog -LogName 'Operations Manager' -Source 'Task Source Name' -EntryType Warning -EventId 1010 -Message 'This is a test event created by task'
"
						]]>
						
					</Argument>
				</Parameters>

			</ConsoleTask>
		</ConsoleTasks>
	</Presentation>

	<LanguagePacks>
		<LanguagePack  ID ="ENU" IsDefault ="true">
			<DisplayStrings>
				<DisplayString  ElementID ="CustomTasks.CreateEvent">
					<Name>CT - Create Test Event</Name>
					<Description>Creates a Warning test event</Description>
				</DisplayString>
			</DisplayStrings>
		</LanguagePack>
	</LanguagePacks>
	<Resources>
		<Assembly ID ="CustomTasks.CTCreateEventAssembly" Accessibility ="Public" FileName ="Res.CustomTasks.CTCreateEventAssembly" HasNullStream ="true" QualifiedName ="Res.CustomTasks.CTCreateEventAssembly" />
	</Resources>  
</ManagementPackFragment>

Here’s the output:

Hope this helps someone out there with similar need.

For further reading, you can go through this thread:

Powershell script in a console task?

Keep SCOMing 🙂

Cheers