Powershell Get_EventLog for multiple servers - windows

Question

I'm a SQL DBA, n00b to Powershell, tasked with sysadmin duties at the moment
I need to query error logs across my servers for Errors and Warnings.
Using my own Google-fu and help from this thread I was able to get this working:
$computers = Get-Content "C:\Servers\ServerList_Short.txt";
# QUERY COMPUTER SYSTEM EVENT LOG
foreach($computer in $computers)
{
Get-EventLog -ComputerName $computer -LogName System -EntryType "Error","Warning" -After (Get-Date).Adddays(-7) `
| Select-Object -Property machineName, EntryType, EventID, TimeGenerated, Message `
| Format-Table -Property MachineName, TimeGenerated, EntryType, Source, Message -AutoSize ;
}
What I am missing at the moment is how to trap for a server in my .txt file that is offline, ignore it and move to the next one. After that, I will be working to dump all of this to a SQL table, results.txt, etc.
Thanks for any help :)]
Kevin3NF

Answer 1

There are a few different ways to handle this but I'd recommend combining a Test-Connection with a Try/Catch, the Test-Connection will make it so that you only try to query the servers which respond to ping and then the Try/Catch will handle any other errors that may come along.
foreach($computer in $computers)
{
if(Test-Connection $computer -Quiet -Count 1){
Try {
Get-EventLog -ComputerName $computer -LogName System -EntryType "Error","Warning" -After (Get-Date).Adddays(-7) `
| Select-Object -Property machineName, EntryType, EventID, TimeGenerated, Message `
| Format-Table -Property MachineName, TimeGenerated, EntryType, Source, Message -AutoSize
} Catch {
Write-Verbose "Error $($error[0]) encountered when attempting to get events from $computer"
}
} else {
Write-Verbose "Failed to connect to $computer"
}
}