Testing if a server is responding

Often, when troubleshooting availability issues, one of the first steps is to test if the server is online. Prior to PowerShell, the tool of choice for testing if a system or device was online was Ping. For only a few systems, this worked well, however problems arose whenever attempting to use the command on a large scale or in a automated fashion.

PowerShell includes a new feature called Test-Connection that allows us to perform the same type of test, but that is more useful for automation. This command returns a Win32_PingStatus object that can be utilized by PowerShell.

In this recipe, we will be executing an ICMP ping against one or more target devices. PowerShell then returns a managed object that can be interpreted by PowerShell to determine the success or failure. PowerShell can then execute tasks based on the success or failure.

For this command to work, we must target a device that is configured to respond to ICMP ping requests. By default, Windows...