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Custom SAM Monitors

I'm looking for two very specific SAM monitors that I unfortunately cannot find.

File Version Monitor (Get's the version of an EXE from the file details)
File Last Write Date (Get's the latest file write time)

I have searched both the built-in application templates and the shared templates on thwack, but alas, I found nothing that would satisfy my requirements. Since they don't exist, I was thinking about creating them, but I couldn't find any clear documentation on how to do this.

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KMSigma.SWI

I can probably do both in PowerShell. Are they supposed to be separate templates or the same with two parts? Do they need to look at one specific find or all files in a directory/path?

mbutler756

Either way would be excellent! They could both be in the same, but I think it would probably be most beneficial to the community if they were separated out as separate thwack templates.

I am looking for specific files, but if the file path was passed in as an arg or could be set within the script, either would be a good solution.

Thanks @KMSigma.SWI

KMSigma.SWI

Actually, I found someone who already did half of the work.

https://thwack.solarwinds.com/t5/SAM-Documents/File-Age-Monitor-Wildcard/ta-p/534418

This is a greatly documented and setup template and you should be able to tweak it for your needs.

KMSigma.SWI

And this is the logic you are looking for to get file version information:

$Executables = Get-ChildItem -Path C:\PathToFiles\ -Filter *.exe -File
$Executables | Select-Object -Property Name, FullName, @{ Name = "ProductVersion"; Expression = { $_.VersionInfo.ProductVersion } }, @{ Name = "FileVersion"; Expression = { $_.VersionInfo.FileVersion } }

That'll give you both "versions" that are exposed by the System.Diagnostics.FileVersionInfo .NET classes.

Version information will be interesting for monitoring. Do you want to just check to see if a file version number matches? Do you want to see if a version number is "higher" than a defined number. Depending on what you want to do, you'll probably have to play a little bit with the System.Version classes.

mbutler756

Unfortunately, the file age monitor won't work for this application. I'll give you a bit of background:

We have deployed SysMon to many of our servers. We are going through several rounds of config changes. Each time the config gets updated, the last write time should change. My goal isn't to see how old a file is, it's to know the date of the "running config". Once we have the sysmon config "tuned", we shouldn't have to touch it much. With the file age monitor, it would very quickly become a problem, whereas if I knew the date of the config was the proper date, I'd be good to go.

tomiannelli

You could take the approach of DNS zone file versioning. By policy and procedure put a version or sequence number as the first line of the file. Then you could do a Get-Content on the item and parse that line to get the number of interest. It works even if you copy the config file to a variety of hosts, meaning you work out the config on one system then deploy it broadly. It eliminates the OS file system variations you might otherwise encounter.