Advanced PowerShell Automation

For IT leaders: Many IT teams still handle monitoring, scheduled jobs, file transfers, and API integrations by hand or with one-off scripts that only one person understands. That creates key-person risk and adds operational overhead. This course helps your experienced administrators turn those scripts into reusable, testable PowerShell tooling.

Role fit: Built for systems administrators with three to five years of Microsoft automation experience. It is not an intro course. Assign foundational PowerShell training first to newer staff.

Time investment: About 17.5 hours across 16 skills. Each skill runs roughly 50–90 minutes and stands on its own, so Team Leads can assign only what matches current priorities, such as:

• Pester infrastructure tests for ping, DNS, and service checks
• Event log and performance counter monitoring
• Scheduled tasks
• Module authoring
• REST API automation

Risk and quality: Learners practice debugging in VS Code, packaging code as modules, and validating infrastructure with Pester. These habits help standardize team code and catch problems before they become outages.

Change-management note: Several skills extend into AWS Lambda, Kubernetes, and the Pode web framework. Confirm these fit your environment before assigning them broadly. The instructor provides GitHub repositories for each skill, so practitioners can follow along hands-on and adapt the examples to your own environment.

IT teams take this course to turn repetitive admin work into tested, reusable tooling, so fewer tasks depend on one person running scripts by hand.

Scenarios from the course:

• Catch outages before users do. Team members write Pester tests that run ping checks, resolve important DNS names, validate service endpoints, and confirm that critical background services or containers are running. The same approach extends to checking patch levels and firewall rules.
• Respond to Windows events automatically. Practitioners use PowerShell to query event logs and performance counters. They then wire Task Scheduler to run a PowerShell action when a specific event is written, which turns log noise into an automated first response.
• Standardize and share team tooling. Engineers package functions into PowerShell modules with proper manifests. They debug the code interactively in Visual Studio Code, so fixes like replacing a hardcoded value happen in one place instead of in scattered script copies.
• Deliver self-service tools without a separate dev team. Admins build terminal UIs, such as an app that cleans up Docker containers with a keypress. They also build Pode web apps that can be containerized and scaled on Kubernetes, which lowers the need for outside developers on internal tools.

The skills also cover scheduling recurring jobs, sending Windows toast notifications for long-running tasks, automating REST APIs, and running PowerShell functions serverless on AWS Lambda. All of them follow GitHub repositories that your team can clone and adapt.

Knowledge

• How PowerShell modules are structured, including the module manifest (metadata) file, and why CI and automated testing matter for code quality
• Native Windows options for automation, including schtasks scheduling triggers and Task Scheduler event handlers that respond to Event Log entries
• Where Windows performance counters and event logs live, and which built-in tools help locate event IDs and counters before scripting against them
• How Pester supports infrastructure testing, from ping, DNS, and service endpoint checks to security checks such as patch status and firewall rules
• How the Pode framework serves web apps and static assets, and how Kubernetes deployments and services expose and horizontally scale those apps
• How PowerShell runs in AWS Lambda and integrates with API Gateway for serverless automation

Ability

• Author, debug, and package reusable PowerShell modules your team can share instead of maintaining one-off scripts
• Schedule recurring tasks and build event-driven responses that run PowerShell automatically when specific Windows events occur
• Write Pester tests that validate websites, DNS resolution, running services, and containers across the environment
• Configure VS Code for PowerShell, then use breakpoints, step-through debugging, and IntelliSense to find and fix defects faster
• Deliver user-facing tools such as BurntToast desktop notifications with progress bars, terminal UIs, and containerized Pode web apps on Kubernetes
• Automate REST APIs, FTP server content, file streams, and text parsing with regular expressions