Verifying server connectivity

When writing your own monitoring and troubleshooting scripts, you need a way to verify that remote systems are online and responding. This can be useful when building a script that needs to poll servers on a regular basis, or to do a routine check within a script to verify that a server is online before invoking one or more commands. In this recipe, we'll take a look at how you can use the shell to verify the connectivity of remote servers.

How to do it...

1. To verify that a remote system is available, use the Test-Connection cmdlet:

   Test-Connection -ComputerName mbx1
   

2. The -ComputerName parameter accepts an array of arguments, so you can test multiple systems at once by specifying multiple server names separated by a comma:

   Test-Connection -ComputerName mbx1,mbx2
   

3. Like the ping command, the cmdlet will send four echo requests to the remote host by default. You can override this using the -Count parameter:

   Test-Connection -ComputerName mbx1,mbx2 -Count 1
   

4. To verify...