No Znx!

I was recently asked if it was possible to monitor the Event Log for a single event and ensure that it was occurring regularly. It is rare that I handle Windows scripting and when I do I normally find myself cursing it, haha! In this case we want to ensure that a print server is constantly printing through the day, we expect that at least 1 print job will occur every 15 minutes, if not then we’d like a warning. Obviously this check should only run during work hours.

So the first step is relatively simple, access the Event Log and look for a single event by its event code.

set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\root\cimv2")
set colEvents = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
   ("Select * from Win32_NTLogEvent Where Logfile = 'System' and EventCode = 10")

What we did here was grab all the events with event code of 10 (a print job!). So if we count the number of events within a range then we will have basically completed a huge part of the work.

So next step is to make an interval that will be 15 minutes back from whatever time is current.

set dtmStartDate = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemDateTime")
dtmStartDate.SetVarDate DateAdd("n",-15,Now()),True

And applying that into our statement:

set colEvents = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
   ("Select * from Win32_NTLogEvent Where Logfile = 'System' and EventCode = 10" _
   & " and TimeWritten >= '" & dtmStartDate & "'")

This means that we are now collecting the events that only occurred within the last fifteen minutes. So what next, well we need to have a statement to pass to BigBrother to indicate success or failure. Fortunately enough I have another script which monitors the cluster (thanks to the awesome DeadCat repository) and it has some code to help place the file that BigBrother collects.

const HKLM = &H80000002
strBBExtPathNew = "SOFTWARE\Quest Software\BigBrother\bbnt\ExternalPath"
strBBExtPathOld = "SOFTWARE\BigBrother\bbnt\ExternalPath"
set oReg = GetObject("winmgmts:\root\default:StdRegProv")
 
oReg.GetStringValue HKLM,strBBExtPathNew,,strExtPath
if isNull(strExtPath) then
  oReg.GetStringValue HKLM,strBBExtPathOld,,strExtPath
end if
if isNull(strExtPath) then
  WScript.Quit
end if

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