As I mentioned in a post earlier this week, I really like the many formatting options in Powershell. Here’s another formatting tip not well-documented in my experience. Let’s take this example in which we are looking at whether agent proxy is enabled on my Operations Manager 2007 agents. I want to print all agents and their agent proxy status to the screen, but I want to be able to quickly identify agents where agent proxy is NOT enabled.

This is quite easily done with a foreach loop and the Powershell equivalent of the if-then statement to change the color of the text based on the value of the ProxyEnabled status for each agent. In this case, if ProxyEnabled = false, text output will be RED. If ProxyEnabled = true, text output will be GREEN. I have commented the sample script below to clarify the meaning of each statement.

#Retrieve all agents and assign to a variable
$agents = get-agent

#For each agent in the $agents variable, execute the IF statement
foreach ($agent in $agents){

#If ProxyEnabled = TRUE, write agent Name and ProxyEnabled status to the console in RED.
If ($agent.ProxyingEnabled -match $true) {write-host $agent.name, $agent.proxyingenabled -foregroundcolor “red”}

else

#If ProxyEnabled = FALSE write agent Name and ProxyEnabled status to the console in GREEN.
{write-host $agent.name, $agent.proxyingenabled -foregroundcolor “darkgreen”}
}

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